(The Nineteenth Century Series) Grace Moore - Dickens and Empire - Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in The Works of Charles Dickens-Routledge (2004) PDF

DICKENS AND EMPIRE
To Fay Moore and Sandra Moore, with love and gratitude

Dickens andEmpire
Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism
in the Works of Charles Dickens
GRACE MOORE
University of Melbourne, Australia
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Moore, Grace
Dickens and empire : discourses of class, race and colonialism in the works of Charles
Dickens. - (The nineteenth century series)
1. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Social and political views 2. Imperialism in literature 3.
Colonies in literature 4. Race in literature 5. India - History - Sepoy Rebellion, 1857-
1858 - Literature and the rebellion
I. Title
823.8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Grace, 1974-
Dickens and empire : discourses of class, race and colonialism in the works of Charles
Dickens / Grace Moore.
p. cm. - (The nineteenth century series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7546-3412-4
1. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Political and social views. 2. Imperialism in literature.
3. Literature and society - England - History - 19th century. 4. Dickens, Charles, 1812-
1870 - Knowledge- India. 5. Social classes in literature. 6. Colonies in literature. 7.
India- In literature. 8. Race in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Nineteenth century
(Aldershot, England)
PR4592.I47M66 2004
823'.8—dc22
2004004819
ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3412-6 (hbk)

Contents
General Editors' Preface vi
List of Figures vii
List of Abbreviations viii
A Note on Terminology ix
Acknowledgements x
Introduction 1
1 Emigration, Transportation, and the Problem of Closure 7
2 National Identity 21
3 The Racial Other 43
4 Red Tape and Circumlocution: The Crimean War 75
5 'How to Make an India Pickle' 91
6 A Tale of Three Revolutions: Dickens's Response to the

Sepoy Rebellion 113
7 Containing Cawnpore: The Reinvention and Reinterpretation

of the Indian Mutiny 135
8 The 1860s and the Decline of the Discourse 157
Afterword 181
Bibliography 185
Index 201
The Nineteenth Century Series
General Editors' Preface
The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest
in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that
former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not
only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major
authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies
of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for
example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel
writing, book production, gender and non-canonical writing. We are dedicated
principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace
a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize
and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations
'Romantic' and 'Victorian'. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing
traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly
predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively
streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual,
artistic and social landscape.
Vincent Newey
Joanne Shattock
University of Leicester
List of Figures
2.1 'The Shipwrecked Ministers Saved by the Great Exhibition
Steamer'. Punch. Volume 20,1851. 237.
Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd. 33
2.2 'Specimens from Mr. Punch's Industrial Exhibition of 1850'.

Punch. Volume 18,1850. 145.
3.1 'The Land of Liberty'.

Punch. Volume 13,1847. 215.
4.1 'A Struggle Between Duty and Inclination'.

Punch. 22 April 1854. 165.
5.1 Detail from The Illustrated London News Grand Diorama

of the Great Exhibition. Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Collection. 100
7.1 'The Asiatic Mystery'.

Punch. 8 August 1857. 65.
7.2 'Justice'. Punch. 12 September 1857. 109.

7.3 'British Homes in India, 1857'.

Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. 138
7.4 'Miss Wheeler Defending Herself Against the Sepoys'.

Charles Ball. The History of the Indian Mutiny. Volume I.
Between 380 and 381. 138
8.1 'How Not To Do It'. Punch. 12 October 1867.

List of Abbreviations
A Child's History of England CHE
American Notes AN
A Tale of Two Cities TC
Barnaby Rudge BR
Bleak House BH
Christmas Books CB
Christmas Stories CS
David Copperfield DC
Dombey and Son DS
Great Expectations GE
Hard Times HT
Little Dorrit LD
Martin Chuzzlewit MC
Miscellaneous Papers MP
Nicholas Nickleby NN
Oliver Twist OT
Our Mutual Friend OMF
Sketches By Boz SBB
The Mystery of Edwin Drood ED
The Old Curiosity Shop OCS
The Pickwick Papers PP
The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces UT an RP
All references are to the Oxford Illustrated Dickens unless stated otherwise.
A Note on Terminology
In order to be historically accurate the terms and names in this book will be those
used by the Victorians. Thus, place names like 'Kanpur' will take the anglicized
'Cawnpore', Native Americans will be referred to as 'Indians' and 'Jamaicans'
will refer to the descendants of African slaves transported to the island. Although
it is now common to refer to the 1857 uprising in India as the First Indian War of
Independence, I shall adhere to the contemporary British labels, 'the Sepoy
Rebellion' and the 'Indian Mutiny'. Finally, idiosyncratic spellings have not been
corrected, hence several variants on words like 'chapattis' will be found within the
text.
Acknowledgements
Having emigrated twice during the course of writing this book, I seem to have
accumulated an inordinate number of debts, which I can only attempt to
acknowledge here in a list of almost Dickensian proportions. The book began as a
doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter and I am grateful to the School of
English research grants committee for funding to attend several overseas
conferences, as well as to the British Academy, now the Arts and Humanities
Research Board, for a studentship to facilitate full-time research. The University
of Bristol's Arts Faculty Research Fund generously provided support for an
extended period of research at the British Library. Ann Donahue and Erika
Gaffney at Ashgate have been superb editors, while Vincent Newey and Joanne
Shattock have been kind and helpful series editors.
At Exeter, Regenia Gagnier was a model internal examiner, making lively and
thought-provoking contributions to the book, and I am extremely grateful for her
input and support. Angelique Richardson kindly discussed many aspects of the
nineteenth-century evolutionary debate with me; Peter Faulkner was extremely
generous with his time and his phenomenal knowledge of Victorian literature and
culture. John Plunkett offered encouragement and feedback, and Mark Whalan was
always on hand with challenging observations and a glass of wine. In addition, my
thanks are due to the organizers of the weekly School of English postgraduate
research group for providing a friendly forum at which to air new ideas and receive
constructive feedback.
My former colleagues at the University of Bristol were all extraordinarily
generous in their support of me, and my work, and I am grateful to them for
making my first job idyllic. My especial thanks go to Elizabeth Archibald,
Andrew Bennett, Stephen Cheeke, Lesel Dawson, Nick Groom, Stephen James,
David Punter and Myra Stokes. I owe a special debt to Rowena Fowler for her
friendship, good humour and infectious enthusiasm.
Leon Litvack of Queen's University, Belfast was a thorough external
examiner, and my thanks go to him for a number of important and interesting
suggestions for improving this project. Dennis Walder of the Open University has
offered encouragement and advice, particularly pertaining to the India chapters. I
am very grateful to John Bowen of York University for sharing his article on
Dickens and slavery with me prior to its publication. I also wish to thank Garrett
Ziegler of Columbia University, who allowed me to read and quote from his work
on The Perils of Certain English Prisoners' and Joachim Stanley of Lincoln
College Oxford, for giving me his MA thesis on Dickens and De Quincey. Chris
Bongie of Queen's University, Ontario has been a good friend, offering
postcolonial and Victorian discussions at all stages, along with other forms of
support. Deborah Morse of the College of William & Mary helped to shape this
work in its earliest stages and continues to offer good-humoured suggestions in
spite of her busy life.
Acknowledgements xi
The Dickens Project based at U.C. Santa Cruz enabled me to interact with
other Dickensians and to deliver parts of Chapters 5 and 6 at its winter conference
at U.C. Davis. My particular thanks go to Murray Baumgarten for his carefully
prepared feedback and to John O. Jordan for his extraordinary kindness and
extremely useful comments. Thanks also go to the conference organizers,
Christine Colon and Catherine Robson, and my teaching partner and fellow
enthusiast for ail things Antipodean, Janet Myers. A section of Chapter 3 was
given as a conference paper at the Dickens Society of America's fourth annual
conference, and I am grateful to Natalie McKnight, who organized the event. My
thoughts on the 'Native' were originally aired at a nineteenth-century research day
at the University of Exeter, where Professors Gretchen Gerzina and Donna Landry
were very generous with their time and feedback. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in
The Dickensian (Winter 2002) and an earlier version of Chapter 8 was published in
Dickens Studies Annual. I am grateful to the editors of both journals for giving my
ideas a platform and for permission to reprint them here.
Many thanks go to the staff of several libraries: the Beinecke Rare Books and
Manuscript Library (especially Steve Jones) the British Library, the University of
Bristol Arts and Social Sciences Library, the University of Exeter Library, the
Devon and Exeter Institution, The Hartley Library at Southampton University,
Koerner Library and the Rare Books Library at the University of British Columbia
(particularly Ralph Stanton), the University of Idaho Library (with particular
thanks to Jennifer O'Laughlin), the University of Melbourne Baillieu Library
(especially Ruth Baxter), the Victoria State Library and Washington State
University Library. The staff of the Dickens House Museum in London have been
helpful in answering a number of questions, and I would like to thank the curators
past and present, David Parker and Andrew Xavier for their patience. I am
extremely grateful to the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study at the University
of British Columbia for electing me to its unique and extraordinary Junior Scholars
in Residence program, where I refined some of the ideas for this book and enjoyed
the university's excellent resources. My thanks go to Pamela Dalziel, Sherill
Grace, Ken MacCrimmon, and the ten other visiting scholars. I gratefully
acknowledge the assistance of the Yale Center for British Art in granting me a
research fellowship to allow me to explore its superbly rich holdings relating to
both the Crystal Palace and India. My particular gratitude goes to Tim Barringer,
Susan Brady, Lisa Ford, Elisabeth Fairman and Mary Beth Graham, all of whom,
in differing ways, made my time in New Haven most enjoyable.
My friends have been endlessly encouraging, offering both a sense of
perspective and differing forms of help and advice. Thanks to: Cort Anderson
Helen Byrom, Karen Daw, Karen Edwards, Jeff Evans, Karen Fish-Foster, Irene
Gonsalvez, Sharyl Kammerzell, Tim Link, Jo and Paul Manly, Melanie Murphy,
Hannelore Nunn, Joy Passanante, Marian and Peter Robinson, Rebecca Selman,
and Gary Williams. My warmest thanks go to my husband, Andrew Robinson, for
everything he has done to facilitate my writing and to promote my happiness. His
intellectual rigour and extraordinary breadth of interests are an inspiration, and his
endlessly challenging conversations, a delight.
xii Dickens and Empire
During this work's transition from dissertation to book, my father lost a long
battle against cancer. To the day of his death he was supportive of this project and
many others, and I shall always be grateful for the slightly bewildered but
nonetheless whole-hearted enthusiasm he showed towards my work, and for his
unconditional love. My very dear friend and mentor, Chris Brooks, also died
tragically early and before this book could be completed. The most inspirational of
supervisors and the kindest of men; there have been so many points during the
revision of this manuscript, as well as in my daily life, when I have missed his
guidance, his common sense and his keen sense of the absurd. I hope the pages
that follow will look something like the book he envisaged.
Introduction
As the son of a naval pay clerk Charles Dickens spent much of his childhood in the
seaports of Portsmouth and Chatham where he would have come into contact with
sailors from all over the world. To a child with an imagination as vivid as that of
the young Dickens, the stories he would have heard from sailors returning from
across the British Empire would have fired his imagination and, like so many of
his childhood memories, stayed with him forever. The East certainly had a strong
imaginative hold over him from an early age and one of his first recorded projects
was the adaptation of James Ridley's Tales of the Genii, when he was just nine
years old.1 However, in his adult life the empire as a whole was to exercise a
curious appeal to his faculties and was to become tied to his vision of the
Condition of England.
The colonies were largely uncharted territory for Dickens (he visited only the
dominion of Canada in 1842 and Ireland in 1858, 1867 and 1869) and the fact that
most of Britain's imperial holdings remained for him unseen can only have
heightened their imaginative potential. Britain's overseas territories were to have a
more lasting influence over his writing than merely offering elaborate orientalized
fantasies, though. Edward Said has defined the role of the empire in nineteenth-
century fiction as:
[A] reference...a point of definition...an easily assumed place of travel,
wealth and service, the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth
century as a codified, if only marginally visible, presence in fiction, very much
like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for
granted, but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied.. .or given density.2
On a superficial level, Said has indeed identified the function of the imperial plot
device as employed in Dickens's early fiction; a convenient place to which
characters could be exiled, or from whence they could return. However, Dickens's
engagements with the empire in his fiction, his journalism, and in his own life were
far more complex and intertwined than has previously been suggested.
Bernard Semmel has argued for an interconnectedness between British imperial
and domestic politics for the Victorians, and this is a useful way of conceptualizing
the links between foreign and domestic policy, class and race.3 Dickens's early
involvement with the empire certainly reflected such an interdependence. He
frequently exiled troublesome members of his large family to make a new start in
the colonies. As Forster wrote of the Dickens family in 1860, 'Charley is in the
Far East, Sydney is at sea, Walter in India, Alfred in Australia, whither he is
planning to send another boy to join him'.4 However, on an artistic level, the
colonies served an important purpose too. Dickens's initial use of emigration as a
means of swiftly tying up a plot and allowing working-class characters to prosper
was far from unique, and many nineteenth-century novelists, including Elizabeth
2 Dickens and Empire
Gaskell and Edward Bulwer Lytton, adopted this form of resolution regularly.
However, as I discuss in Chapter 1, Dickens's need to confront social problems in
his fiction led to his speedy dissatisfaction with a solution that could, by its very
nature, only aid a select few and which was not permanent. Moreover emigration
did not attempt to deal with the root causes of poverty that were Dickens's primary
concern.
Having briefly attempted to use the imperial territories as a space to contain
British socio-economic problems, the two became inextricably linked in Dickens's
imagination. Like Henry Mayhew he adopted a process of displacement whereby
the urban poor came to be aligned in his work with the colonized, both as a means
of stimulating public interest in their less-than-exotic lives, and as a way of
emphasizing their complete alienation. As early as The Pickwick Papers Dickens
attacked the type of telescopic philanthropy against which he would later mount a
full-scale onslaught in the form of Bleak House's Mrs Jellyby. He also came to
conceive of the other worlds of Victorian penury, like London's East End, as areas
in need of the type of missionary activity that he regarded as misplaced in the
distant colonies when there was still so much work to be done at home.
The connections between the colonized and the urban poor went far deeper
than mere metaphor. The British territories overseas replicated the class and
labour relations of the home market, replacing class divisions with the even more
rigid and insurmountable category of race. Dickens emphasized the similarities
and explicit connections between the working classes at home and the slave in
North America or the 'savage' in Borrioboola Gha to show the economics of the
othering process. The colonized became the new working class in areas like India
where the peasant class (known as ryots) found themselves paying taxes to the East
India Company, rather than a local landowner. For Dickens a complex dialogue
arose between the categories of race and class whereby he configured the English
working classes as akin to the colonized, although as Bleak House makes clear,
they were often far more neglected. Although he has overstated the impact of
imperial growth upon the fortunes of the national economy, Raymond Williams's
assessment of the ties between domestic and colonial labour is a useful one:
What was happening in the 'city', the 'metropolitan' economy, determined
and was determined by what was made to happen in the 'country'; first the
local hinterland and then the vast regions beyond it, in other people's lands.
What happened in England has since been happening ever more widely, in
new dependent relationships between all the industrialised nations and all the
other 'undeveloped' but economically important lands. Thus one of the last
models of 'city and country' is the system we now know as imperialism.5
With the empire constituting the source of so many domestic fortunes (whether
through the wholesale retail and export business ofDombey and Son or the cotton
manufacturing of Coketown), Dickens's displacement of his discussion of the
working classes onto the colonized followed an impeccable logic of causality.
Britain's imperial possessions were regarded as a sign of the nation's
greatness as a world power, and the formal acquisition of colonies resulted from
the nation's advancement as the foremost industrialized nation. This pursuit of
Introduction 3
territory was in reality an ongoing quest for new consumers and ever new
commodities to offer in the global marketplace. Marx encapsulated that
dependency when he remarked that, 'The need of a constantly expanding market
for its products...chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It
must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere'.6
However, only a very small proportion of the British population actually profited
in any significant way through imperial trade, notwithstanding this endless pursuit
of wealth. Marx goes on—with reference to the British presence in India—to
succinctly explain the social injustice of propping-up a large and costly empire:
It is evident that individuals gain largely by the British connection with India,
and of course their gain goes to increase the national wealth. But against this a
very large offset is made. The military and naval expenses [are] paid out of
the pocket of the people of England...and it may be doubted whether, on the
whole, this dominion does not threaten to cost quite as much as it can ever be
expected to come to.7
It was not simply the conquering and defence of the empire that was costly in both
fiscal and social terms. As Davis and Huttenback point out, 'British subsidies to
the dependent Empire; and British business and labor absorbed the majority of the
costs imposed by the monopsonistic practices of the Crown Agents for the
Colonies'.8 Dickens himself was keenly aware that enormous sums of public
money were being wasted upon mere circumlocution, or the art of 'how not to do
it' [LD 145]. Indeed, while he supported the self-sufficient colonies of settlement,
he deeply resented any involvement with dependent colonies, requiring efforts that
he felt could be put to better use at home and distracting bureaucrats from the
ameliorative work necessary in the mother country.
By the 1850s Dickens had become deeply depressed by the Condition of
England. In the past he had employed imperial metaphors and imagery to draw
attention to the rigidity of social divisions in Britain. However, between 1854 and
1857 his view of the state of the nation had become entangled with his anger at
overseas crises, firstly in the Crimea and, more dramatically, in India in 1857. In
hitting out at the appalling mismanagement of the Crimean War in a speech to the
Administrative Reform Association on 27 June, 1855, he explicitly equated the
present state of England with the bleak house he had envisaged at the beginning of
the decade.
A respectable old gentleman with a large and costly establishment of servants,
finds his household in complete disorder, and that he can get nothing done.
When he asks his servants to give his children bread, they give them stones;
when they are told to give those children fish, they give them serpents. What
they are ordered to send to the East they send to the West; when they ought to
be serving dinner in the North, they are consulting obsolete and exploded
cookery books in the South; they break, lose, forget, waste, destroy; only
tumble over one another when required to do anything; and make the
respectable gentleman's house a scene of scandalous ruin.9
As discussed in Chapter 4, Dickens felt that the state had failed in its duties toward
the people and was incensed at the incompetence and nepotism that he saw
obstructing progress all around him, not to mention misplaced priorities. Having
initially disliked both Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace and the exhibition it housed,
the structure became for him an icon for imperial and domestic mismanagement,
which returned to haunt his imagination during the Crimean War and the Indian
Mutiny. He felt so much disdain for the palace, it would seem, because he
believed that an administration able to organize a vast, multi-national display
should both give priority to, and be able to cater for, the needs of its poor. As
Chapters 2 and 4 discuss, Dickens viewed the efforts of figures like Henry Cole
(the former assistant keeper at the Public Records Office and a key member of the
Great Exhibition Executive Committee) and Prince Albert to be misplaced.
Moreover, with his increased despondency, implicit in his contempt for the display
at Hyde Park appears to have been the incredulity that a nation able to put on an
ordered exposition at short notice should be unable to organize a war. At the very
least, provisions sent to the West would arrive in the West. Dickens's anger at the
bureaucratic red-tape that was both impeding basic essential reforms on matters
like urban sanitation and causing loss of life through failing to equip the troops in
the Crimea against the harsh winters of Eastern Europe was by no means quelled
when the war ended. Rather, his despondency and fury simmered and merged with
other factors to create an enormous public outburst in 1857.
Dickens's best known and most controversial engagement with the empire was
his reaction to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, an event that is given in-depth
consideration in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. Dickens had certainly depicted colonized
others before in his fiction, usually as in the case of the Native ofDombey and Son
as a means of discussing the state of the British working classes. However, the
Mutiny dominated his thoughts in the late 1850s and shaped his fiction of the
period accordingly. Admittedly outspoken and unpleasant, Dickens's responses to
the uprising have, in the past, been too readily dismissed as evidence of a sustained
racism first manifesting itself in his 1853 article, 'The Noble Savage', however,
Chapter 3 offers a re-evaluation of this controversial piece of writing. An
examination of the previously neglected Household Words journalism dealing with
pre-Mutiny India, dwelling upon the need for administrative and social reform on
the subcontinent complicates our understanding of Dickens's response by
highlighting his swift transformation from supporter of the Indian ryot (peasant)
class at the beginning of the 1850s to outraged reactionary by 1857. It was not
simply the uprising against the East India Company and the horrendous slaughter
of British women that led to his unprecedented public rant, however. As Lillian
Nayder has observed, 'Dickens's racism was generated by domestic as well as
imperial anxieties, since class tensions in England, not only hostilities in India,
were brought to the fore by the mutiny'.10 In fact, the Mutiny became an outlet for
seven years' worth of suppressed anger at official negligence both at home and
abroad. While Dickens's conceptions of class and race had always converged, his
consideration of the colonial and the domestic became horribly entangled in the
late 1850s.
The India display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 may have been at least
partially to blame for the shock of the revolt. The display led the British public to
Introduction 5
adopt a series of beliefs in Indian docility, enabling them to ignore the turbulence
brewing on the subcontinent. The image of India projected by the Crystal Palace
and consumed by the public at large was directly influenced by James Mill's
History of India, and bore little resemblance to the reality of life on the
subcontinent. Thus, while to the modern reader the signs of rebellion may seem to
have been all too evident in the early 1850s, the revolt was completely unexpected
to the mid-Victorians. Unanticipated as it was, the Mutiny had a deep and lasting
impact upon Britain's perception of itself as an imperial power, and Dickens—
whose journal had deliberately attempted to read against the grain of the
Exhibition's India narrative—was extremely vocal in his opinions at this time of
crisis and self-assessment. The numerous letters, articles and speeches he wrote
relating to events in India reveal the state of flux into which Dickens's thoughts
and opinions were thrown by reports from Cawnpore, the scene of the revolt's
most notorious attack against two hundred British women and children. Although
much has been made of Dickens's unpleasant and bloodthirsty calls for vengeance
in the massacre's immediate aftermath, these demands were in fact restricted to a
six-month period. When it became apparent—largely through the reports of his
friend, the famous Crimean War reporter William Howard Russell—that the
ghastly actions of the sepoys were matched by equally repugnant behaviour on the
part of the British, Dickens's outbursts ceased abruptly.
An examination of the later stages of the Mutiny, along with its immediate
aftermath reveals that Dickens swiftly reconfigured his attitudes toward India and
the Indian peoples. By charting the literary and historical process of reinventing
and reinterpreting the insurrection, Chapter 7 shows how the 1859 novel A Tale of
Two Cities constituted a revision of the overt racism of the 1857 allegory of events
in India The Perils of Certain English Prisoners'. In A Tale of Two Cities Dickens
revised his attitude towards the sepoy soldiers and the rebels who joined them, by
sympathetically aligning them with both the French third estate of 1789, and the
English working classes. Indeed, following his explosion of 1857 Dickens was
certainly more cautious about speaking out on matters of race in the future.
Indeed, as I demonstrate in Chapter 8, by the 1860s, Dickens had separated out the
discourses of race and class and his interest in events overseas was on the wane.
By the end of his career he was far more concerned with issues that impacted upon
him directly, like the Irish Question and the electoral reform issue, although even
these concerns took second place to the demands of his family and his own
declining health.
As one of Britain's foremost novelists and the editor of an influential
periodical, Dickens's views on both class and race were potentially far-reaching.
They have in the past been misread, largely as a result of undue weight being
accorded to 'The Noble Savage', while considerations of his reactions to the Indian
uprising have restricted themselves to a study of Dickens's most immediate (and
sensational) outbursts. This book does not seek to exonerate Dickens from charges
of racism, but rather to examine his changing imaginative engagement with the
empire and his complex attitude toward the racial other at key stages of personal,
national and global significance.
Notes
1 Fred Kaplan. Dickens: A Biography. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988. 28.
2 Edward W. Said. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. 75.
3 Bernard Semmel. The Governor Eyre Controversy. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1962.
7.
4 Quoted in Una Pope-Hennessy. Charles Dickens. 1945. London: The Reprint Society,
1947. 427.
5 Raymond Williams. The Country and the City. 1973. London: The Hogarth Press,
1993. 279.
6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Introduction by
A.J.P. Taylor. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985. 83.
7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The First Indian War of Independence. 1959.
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. 80.
8 Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback. Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The
Economics of British Imperialism, (abridged edition). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988. 137.
9 KJ. Fielding (ed.). The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.
203-4.
10 Lillian Nayder. Unequal Partners: Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002.
Chapter 1
Emigration, Transportation, and the

Problem of Closure
'One of the strangest things about the advance of England is the many-sided
character of the form of early settlement: Central North America we plant with
Mormons, New Zealand with the runaways of our whaling ships, Tasmania and
portions of Australia with our transported Felons'.l
One of Dickens's earliest engagements with the colonies was through the issue of
emigration, both as a device to facilitate narrative closure and, of course as a very
real solution for large numbers of working-class men and women throughout the
nineteenth century. Indeed, it is perhaps in this banishment of the poor to distant
shores that we may find the origins of the displacement process that frequently led
Dickens to employ a colonial discourse when discussing the otherness of the urban
poor. In his early works the Empire was little more than a useful repository to
contain a number of social problems, and this usage does not differ significantly
from the official government policy of 'shovelling out paupers', which led to the
emergence of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission in 1847.2 As Patrick
Brantlinger has noted:
In the middle of the most serious domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely
texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal,
banishment, or return for characters who for one reason or another need to
enter or exit from scenes of domestic conflict.3
One of the major factors behind the nineteenth-century fascination with the distant
Empire was the improvement in both land transportation and steam shipping,
which made travel to the colonies cheaper and easier than ever before. Large-scale
crises such as the Irish famine also brought the emigration issue to the fore, as an
efficient means of dealing with the immediate results of social problems, rather
than the causes.
Asa Briggs neatly encapsulates the acceleration of emigration in lieu of
domestic reform when he states, 'In 1815 less than two thousand persons left the
British Isles: in 1830 the figure was over 55,000; by the late 1840s and early '50s
more than a quarter of a million emigrants were leaving in single years'.4 Dickens
himself was complicit in the promotion of this exodus, as is evidenced through his
involvement with the Urania Cottage project of his friend the heiress, Angela
Burdett Coutts. The scheme involved the reclamation and rehabilitation of young
women—usually 'fallen'—who were attempting to leave a life of crime behind
them. For Dickens, the removal of the women to new shores was an integral part
of the rehabilitation process. As he stated rather ironically in a letter to W.J.
Broderipinl850:
I assist my friend Miss Coutts in the management of a small private Institution
she maintains for reclaiming young women, instructing them in all sound
domestic knowledge, and sending them out to Australia or elsewhere.
We don't consider a Magdalen qualification indispensable, but we don't object
to it, and we are glad (when we are not foil) to receive any reasonably hopefol
case of distress or offence. We would prefer not to have them beyond twenty
years of age, and we impress upon them that Emigration is an essential part of
our compact.5
In stressing the importance of emigration to his scheme, Dickens exhibits the same
impatience with governmental irresponsibility toward the underclass that he would
display in the novels of the mid- 1850s, with the refrain that the state of the nation
was 'nobody's fault'. It is obvious that he regards emigration as a vital component
of the redemptive process, and it is important to ask why this should be the case. It
would appear that in Dickens's mind these women could only be completely
rehabilitated if they were removed from the 'corrupting' elements present in
industrial Britain, and the stigma that would be attached to them as 'fallen' women.
Such a stance presents an interesting paradox when juxtaposed with the prohibition
imposed by society against the return of convicts. In Dickens's imagination such
less-than-desirable elements seem to inhabit a bizarre dual position as both
symptoms of the shortcomings of society and also contributors to the cause of its
decay. In either case their return was to be secured against.
Little government assistance existed for those who wished to start afresh in the
colonies, and for the poorest emigration was simply not an option unless they
could find assistance from charitable organizations. Although the vast majority of
emigrants funded their ventures themselves, associations such as the social
reformer Caroline Chisholm's Family Colonization Loan Society did offer a
limited degree of support to candidates who were considered industrious enough to
recoup the cost of a loan. As a 'Chips' article from Household Words notes,
Chisholm's society offered, 'a self-supporting system of emigration, for assisting
industrious people, and for promoting practically the spread of sound moral
principles in a much neglected colony'.6 A rigorous screening procedure was in
operation before loans were allocated, and to prove their commitment to the
venture, would-be participants were required to pay half of their fare in advance
through weekly or monthly instalments. Mrs Chisholm was extremely outspoken
on the neglect of the British underclass, and recognized that to remove some of the
sufferers would be a more efficient and humane solution than waiting for the
government to take action:
Whether I look to Ireland or to Scotland, the first view is one of a very
harrowing character,—ghastly beings obstruct my vision; and when I consider
the modes of belief which have been adopted to remedy this appalling
misery—the anxious solicitude of the paternal Government—the long debates
in both Houses of Parliament,—and the subject increases in difficulty, and
magnifies in proportion.7
Here Chisholm identifies the bureaucratic forces of circumlocution that impede
Emigration, Transportation, and the Problem of Closure 9
reform through discussion instead of action, and her tone is remarkably similar to
the stance Dickens was to adopt during the 1850s. Although he was later to
lampoon Chisholm as the feckless telescopic philanthropist, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak
House, Dickens was actively involved in her scheme and collaborated with her on
the 'Bundle of Emigrants' Letters' that appeared in the first issues of Household
Words. The letters, which claimed to be authentic, are a testament to the bourgeois
self-help ethos espoused by Dickens. As the preamble to the bundle states:
The design [of the Colonization Loan Society] is based, in the main, upon
three positions. First, "That it is melancholy to reflect that thousands of
British subjects should watider about, more like spectres than beings of flesh
and blood; and that hundreds should die from starvation, while our vast
colonies could provide abundantly for them". Secondly, "that in England a
society is much needed, the great moral aim of which should be to check
crime, by protecting and encouraging virtue". Thirdly, "that the zealous
endeavours of the charitable, combined with the industrious and frugal efforts
of the working classes themselves" could accomplish great ends in the way of
emigration.8
Of course, as the historian David Thomson has pointed out, 'The 'push' was
always more important than the 'pull', and it was frequently those individuals, for
example, industrial workers during the 'hungry forties', who were least equipped
for the pioneer existence who wanted to resettle.9 The Irish potato famine of 1845-
1851 also caused a mass exodus, as the Irish sought better lives in other British
colonies, and in North America. As early as 1842, though, Dickens highlighted the
American dependence upon Irish labour in his American Notes:
It would be hard to keep your model republics going, without the countrymen
and countrywomen of these two [Irish] labourers. For who else would dig,
and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and
execute great lines of Internal Improvement! [AN 81, my brackets]
Leon Litvack helpfully reminds us that in this consideration of pre-famine
emigration, the Irish labourer is characterized as honest and hard-working, the very
linchpins of the New World.10 Not all emigrants were as useful as the manual
workers described here, though. In January 1850 Reynolds' Newspaper issued a
dire warning to potential colonists that they would be 'ten thousand times more
miserable when turned adrift in some colony at the end of the world'11 than if they
remained in the mother country, and indeed, Dickens seems to subscribe to a
similar opinion, as early as 1843, in Martin Chuzzlewit when Martin and the
relentlessly jolly Mark Tapley travel to America to seek their fortunes.12 The
novel's narrator highlights the problem of the unskilled emigrant when he
describes a group of starving failed settlers:
There they were, all huddled together with the engine and the fires. Farmers
who had never seen a plough; woodmen who had never used an axe; builders
who couldn't make a box; cast out of their own land, with not a hand to aid
them; newly come into an unknown world, children in helplessness, but men
in wants, with younger children at their backs, to live or die as it might
happen. [A/C372]
Martin Chuzzlewit shows the life of the emigrant to be a perilous existence of

drudgery and toil, based upon delusion and deliberate deception on the part of a
nation wishing to free itself from the burden of the poor. The voice of Mr Bevan,
who urges Martin to speak out on the plight of the misguided settlers on his escape
from the Eden settlement, may here be equated with Dickens's own stance on
emigration:
If you ever become a rich man, or a powerful one you shall try to make your
Government more careful of its subjects when they roam abroad to live. Tell
it what you know of emigration in your own case, and impress upon it how
much suffering may be prevented with a little pains! [MC 546-7].
Here Bevan emphasizes the danger of allowing emigrants to embark on a journey
into the unknown with little or no awareness of the hardships that will greet them
in the new country. Sevan's views here are likely to have been inspired by
Dickens's first visit to America (22 January to 7 June 1842), where, on his passage
home, he witnessed at first hand the 'little world of poverty' of the unsuccessful
emigrants, many of whom had sold their clothes in order to raise money for their
passage home. He cautioned:
The whole system of shipping and conveying these unfortunate persons, is one
that stands in need of thorough revision. If any class deserve to be protected
and assisted by the Government, it is that class who are banished from their
native land in search of the bare means of subsistence...The law is bound, at
least upon the English side, to see that too many of them are not put on board
one ship: and that their accommodations are decent; not demoralising and
profligate. It is bound, too, in common humanity, to declare that no man shall
be taken on board without his stock of provisions being previously inspected
by some proper officer, and pronounced moderately sufficient for his support
upon the voyage. [AN 223-224]
Dickens here points to the moral responsibility incumbent upon the government to
ensure that prospective emigrants did not transport themselves to even deeper
misery than they were attempting to flee. However, in spite of his warnings, and
as many of the Household Words articles testify, Dickens did advocate relocation
for the industrious as a rapid means of alleviating suffering, but only when it could
be regulated by a competent and responsible organization.
Notwithstanding his involvement with projects like Urania House, by 1850
Dickens's narrative approach toward emigration had undergone a definite shift. As
an artist dealing with, and at times breaking away from, the constraints of realist
fiction, Dickens had become troubled by the problem of ending. The critic Deirdre
David has examined what she refers to as 'fictions of resolution', and posits:
'Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, each in his or her own
historical and artistic province, create fictions of resolution for the problems of
pervasive social uneasiness with which they engage'.13 Whilst undoubtedly true of
the early works, by the time of David Copperfield (1849-1850) Dickens's novels
had become increasingly uncomfortable with contrived, conventional narrative
closure. David Lodge has, through his character Robyn Penrose, rather flippantly
highlighted some of the factors that may have contributed to Dickens's unease with
the stock ending: 'all the Victorian novelist could offer as a solution to the
problems of industrial capitalism were: a legacy, a marriage, emigration or
death'.14 However, as Dickens's novels became increasingly concerned with the
Condition of England Question, he became reluctant to resort to what he regarded
as an evasive form of closure, which obscured the need for urgent social reform.
Indeed, after the would-be bank robber Tom Gradgrind's flight to the United States
at the end of Hard Times (1854), Dickens never used emigration to resolve a plot
again. Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) mentions briefly that
he had contemplated leaving England so as to avoid the stigma of his socially
unacceptable marriage with the working-class Lizzie Hexam, but following his
maiming and subsequent redemption from ennui and debauchery he abandons this
venture and remains in England to face the 'Voice of Society' [OMF 818].
The would-be emigrants of Martin Chuzzlewit had already proven that an
attempt to leave problems behind could not be effective. However, by the late
1850s in Little Dorrit (1855-1857), the mode of shipping off those unable to
succeed at home had become so problematic for Dickens that an expedition to
Canada arranged for the wastrel Tip Dorrit is aborted at the Liverpool docks before
it has even begun when Tip decides to 'cut it' [LD 76] as a pointless exercise.
Magwitch and Pip are, of course, captured in their bid to leave England, although
Pip later becomes an exile in his work for the Eastern branch of Clarriker and Co,,
his connection to the East is purely a business relationship and his old life on the
marshes is constantly before his eyes during his self-banishment detailed in the
revised ending. Dickens was, however, far from alone in his growing
dissatisfaction with the customary ending. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre had been
one of the first literary figures to react against the trite Victorian convention of
closure through emigration by rejecting St. John Rivers's proposal that the pair
should journey to India as missionaries, declaring:
I am not under the slightest obligation to go to India: especially with
strangers...! am convinced that, go when and with whom I would, I should not
live long in that climate...God did not give me my life to throw away; and to
do as you wish me would, I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing
suicide. Moreover, before I definitively resolve in quitting England, I will
know for certain whether I cannot be of greater use by remaining in it than by
leaving it.15
Dickens's fiction does not reject the emigration solution in such an adamant
manner, but rather undermines it through a comedic usage that would have been
inconceivable to more serious-minded contemporaries like Bronte or Elizabeth
Gaskell.
When faced with the problem of how to end Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell
neatly evaded the problem of reintegrating her hero Jem Wilson into the
community after his trial for murder, by despatching him and his new wife to the
colonies. Mary herself now carries the double stigma of a dalliance with the
philandering factory owner's son, Harry Carson—which has compromised her
reputation—and of the fact that she is a murderer's daughter; so as, Gaskell
perceives it, the only option open to the couple is to restart their lives elsewhere.
Jem encapsulates this need for a new beginning when he declares, 'I must leave
Manchester; and I'd as lief quit England at once when I'm about it9.16 At a
superficial glance, the conclusion of David Copperfield would appear to advocate a
similar resolution. Little Em'ly, the young woman who has been 'ruined9 by
David's friend Steerforth, is able to find relative peace, 'liked by young and old;
sowt out by all that has any trouble9 [DC 869] in the outback, while the 'fallen
woman9, Martha Endell is able to find a husband who does not object to her
history, living 'fower hundred miles away from any voices but their own and the
singing birds9 [DC 869]. Even the cantankerous Mrs Gummidge receives a
proposal in this land of opportunities. The ending, however, becomes increasingly
implausible as something finally 'turns up9 for the Micawber family who have
risen to a position of prominence in direct contrast to their financially embarrassed
circumstances at home. The closure eventually reaches a point close to absurdity
when the minor figure of Mr Mell, the timid, flute-playing schoolmaster,
resurfaces as, 'Doctor Mell (of Colonial Salem-House Grammar School
Middlebay)'[DC577].
Having never actually visited Australia, Dickens's fleeting depictions of life in
the settlement were largely informed by Household Words articles like 'An
Australian Ploughman's Story9 by John and Samuel Sidney.17 Interestingly
Samuel had himself never visited Australia either, but relied upon the accounts of
his brother John, who had lived as a bushman in New South Wales for six years.
The letters received at Urania Cottage from the 'reclaimed9 young women who had
been despatched to begin new lives would also have offered Dickens a taster of life
in the outback. Although as Coral Lansbury has suggested, along with other
influential writers like Bulwer Lytton and Charles Reade, Dickens 'evolved a new
Australia that bore only passing resemblance to the country as it existed9.18
Lansbury continues to argue that if Dickens had decided to tour Australia in the
early 1860s—an idea he briefly contemplated—then 'the whole concept of the
country in English literature would have been changed9.19 However, the fact that
Dickens never saw this country—to which he exiled two of his own sons—gave it
a strangely illusory quality that made it both real, and yet not real. As a result there
is something not quite real about the lives of the characters he ships off to the
settlement, and the wealth that they accumulate. In David Copperfield, for
instance, Dickens seems to equate success in the colony with some kind of colossal
bluff. For the impecunious Micawbers it is a place where they can effortlessly
prosper, and where Mr Micawber's empty rhetoric can achieve a success that it
would never have found in his English existence.20 Thus, the prosperity of the
Micawbers, the Peggottys and even Mr Mell on the one hand confirms the popular
belief that emigration would lead to prosperity, while on the other, the sheer
absurdity of the resolution is ironic and suggests an authorial warning that the
Australia Dickens depicts is, quite literally, a Utopia—a no-such-place. The final
pages of David Copperfield are, then, a point of transition and a tongue-in-cheek
acknowledgement of the novelist's growing need to confront the root causes of
social evils, rather than simply to offer fictitious remedies for their effects.
Exiling problematic characters to distant dominions was certainly, in the early
novels, an expedient means of providing the conventional 'happy ending'

demanded by readers and the marketplace. Anthony Chennells offers an important
reminder that with the exception of the Micawbers, all Dickens's other travellers
gravitate back to London sooner or later.21 Indeed, as early as The Pickwick
Papers (1836-1837), Dickens displayed a fascination with those figures who
repudiated the resolution of banishment meted out for them by both society and
indeed novelists—the returned exile. The very act of return is demonstrative of the
shortcomings of emigration as a viable remedy for the evils of poverty, as is
evidenced in the quite ludicrous ending of Martin Chuzzlewit when Mark and
Martin's impoverished Eden neighbours resurface in Monument Yard, having
somehow miraculously scraped together the funds to return home [MC 832]. The
early novels are in fact quite littered with returnees. In Nicholas Nickleby, the
former convict, Brooker reappears like a ghost to haunt Ralph Nickleby with his
past, and in Oliver Twist the ghastly gothic figure of Monks returns from the West
Indies to disrupt Oliver's new life. Among the other unwelcome returnees is Little
Nell's brother, Fred Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop who journeys from Demerara,
whither he had been sent by his grandfather. Interestingly though, Dickens opts
not to banish the villain Sampson Brass for his crimes. We are informed, 'Finally,
some of the points were given in Sampson's favour, and some against him; and the
upshot was, that, instead of being desired to travel for a time in foreign parts, he
was permitted to grace the mother country under certain restrictions' [OCS 548].
Also, in David Copperfield, Miss Betsey Trotwood's profligate husband returns
from exile and apparent death in India to plague Miss Betsey by attempting to
extort money from her. It would seem, then, that even in the early novels, Dickens
began to manifest unease with the apparently simple resolution of exile, and
discomfort at the idea that social or economic misfits could be contained by
exporting them across the globe.
The factors underlying the emigrant's return were various. Many migrated
with the dream of amassing fortunes in the opulent colonies and then returning to a
life of comfort in the mother country. Only a very few realized their ambitions.
Many others simply returned disillusioned and in even direr straits than before they
left. As Charles Wentworth Dilke noted, there was a distinct lack of information
available to the would-be settler about the skills required in the new colony:
Of immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an over-great supply.
Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers, and the
like, do well in the colonies, and are always wanted; of clerks, governesses,
iron-workers, and skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always an
over-supply. By a perverse fate, the latter are the immigrants of whom
thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite of the daily publication in
England of dissuading letters.22
Dickens was all too aware of this problem, and through pieces included in
Household Words such as Samuel Sidney's 'Letters of Introduction to Sydney' his
journal attempted to point out the numerous pitfalls and tribulations of life as an
Australian colonist.23 The article focuses particularly on the corruption of local
government officials as well as the schism between the immigrant community and
that of the emancipated convicts. The piece concludes with the comment that,
'Sydney would be a delightful place if the men in trade could be inoculated with a
few honourable principles'.24 Nonetheless, the brutal honesty of such accounts is
undermined by other pieces like John Capper and W.H. Wills's 'First Stage to
Australia9, an article presenting a somewhat Utopian view of emigration as a cure
for all social ills: 'They who have been inured to labour are off, from hunger, toil,
and sorrow, to plenty, to comfort, and happiness. They are off, from the poor-
house, the jail, and the asylum, to the green hills, and fertile fields of a new land'.25
Notwithstanding this overly optimistic tone, the majority of articles carried by
Household Words do, however, urge caution to the prospective emigrant and are
unquestionably at odds with Thomas Campbell's earlier epic vision of a 'grey-
haired swain' surveying his new world:
Emblazed with ruby vintage, ripening corn,
And verdant rampart of acacian thorn,
While, mingling with the scent his pipe exhales,
The orange-grove's and fig-tree's breath prevails.26
Sadly, Campbell's Arcadian dream fell a long way short of the reality for most
immigrants, and there were no schemes afoot to assist the disillusioned traveller to
return home. The returnee was often considered a failure, and as such was
completely dependent upon the charity of friends and families.
If the reality of colonial settlement repelled many from the utilitarian Jeremy
Bentham's famous Utopian vision of 'men spreading in distant climes, through
distant ages, from the best stock, the earth covered with British population, rich
with British wealth, tranquil with British security, the fruit of British law', another
sector of emigrant society who were by no means construed as part of the 'best
stock' exercised a strong imaginative hold over Dickens.27 Transportation was
another notorious way for Britain to expel undesirable elements from the
community. Criminals had been exiled to penal colonies in America—like the
Virginia settlement to which Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders finds herself
transplanted—between 1718 and 1783. Following the American War of
Independence, legislation was passed in 1784 to authorize the transportation of
convicts from Britain to Australia instead. The First Fleet (containing
approximately seven hundred and eighty convicts, along with over five hundred
free settlers) set sail for Botany Bay in New South Wales in 1787, inaugurating a
system that would see over one hundred and sixty thousand criminals exported,
until transportation was ended in 1867. The final convict ship arrived in Australia
with a human cargo that included sixty Fenian political prisoners on 10 January
1868.
Dickens was as fascinated by transportation as he was by the entire
penitentiary system and the returned transport is a figure who emerges with
marked regularity throughout his fiction, pointing to the futility of attempting to
banish social problems overseas. The earliest instance of such a prisoner is in the
manuscript given to Mr Pickwick, 'The Convict's Return' in The Pickwick Papers.
In this case, the return of the convict, John Edmunds, who has served his time for
robbery is sanctioned by society, unlike that of Magwitch in Great Expectations.
However, the social background of the criminal is remarkably similar to that of

Pip's benefactor, in that Edmunds9 home Parish takes no action to protect him
from the wrath of a drunken father when he is a small child:
They were poor—they could not be otherwise when the man pursued such
courses; but the woman's unceasing and unwearied exertions, early and late,
morning, noon and night, kept them above actual want. Those exertions were
but ill repaid. People who passed the spot in the evening—sometimes at a late
hour of the night—reported that they had heard the moans and sobs of a
woman in distress, and the sound of blows: and more than once, when it was
past midnight, the boy knocked softly at the door of a neighbour's house,
whither he had been sent, to escape the drunken fury of his unnatural father.
[PP74-5]
Through returning to make his tale known, the convict is used by Dickens to draw
attention to the negligence of the state, a device he again returns to in Great
Expectations. However, as Patrick Brantlinger has astutely remarked, this
convict's life in Australia was far from penitential as, 'Only on his return does
Edmunds come to terms with his guilty past and his parents; there is no suggestion
that his time in Australia is meaningful, or that the location of his punishment has a
reformative influence upon him'.28 Dickens remained, throughout his life,
unconvinced that transportation presented an adequate remedial measure. In
Dombey and Son, Carker's cast-off mistress Alice Marwood bitterly recounts a
similar set of experiences to both Edmunds and Magwitch. Her plight also begins
with neglect and ends in her transportation for theft, and when she returns to
England she has only been embittered by her experience.
The returnees, however, do have an important function within the narrative.
Mikhail Bakhtin has commented upon the importance of the 'vnenakhodimost',29
or 'outsidedness' of a detached observer, such as someone returning from exile to
an improved understanding of our culture:
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who
understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative
understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see
one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole...our real exterior can be
seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us
in space and because they are others.30
As a returned convict who has been forcibly expelled, Magwitch in Great
Expectations occupies a more complex position than mere 'outsidedness' and
becomes a tool for a critique of contemporary British society. He is both insider
and exile; one who has been abused by the social system and who has as a result
come to abuse that same system. As a marginalized criminal he draws attention to
the inherent flaws of a society that fails to provide for 'ragged little creeturs' [GE
328] and instead stigmatizes them as 'terrible hardened ones' [GE 328]. What
Bakhtin would descibe as a dialogical process of simultaneous alienation and
association is perhaps best encapsulated in the scene where Magwitch recounts one
of his many imprisonments. He describes a group of phrenologists measuring him
in an attempt to detect the traits that make him a 'criminal type'. By implication, it
is in fact the body politic, the state, which manifests these traits through its
criminal negligence of its citizens. Extending Bakhtin's paradigm, then, it is not
only Magwitch who possesses the outsider's clarity of understanding; his narrative
also facilitates a new perspective for the reader.31 As Philip Collins points out,
transportation had virtually come to an end by 1852 (although not formally
abolished until 1868) as colony after colony refused to accept convicts. Dickens's
use of transportation and historical distance in Great Expectations must therefore
be regarded as a concerted attempt to provide his readers with the viewpoint of one
who has been both socially and geographically alienated. A man, like Magwitch,
who has been reduced to crime in order to survive and who, already marginalized,
is then excluded from society altogether by the legal system. The dominant society
thus defines its superiority from its lesser colonies through excluding 'unworthy'
elements, namely those seeking to circumvent the process of labour and production
by seizing property for themselves. Having transgressed the borders of the law, the
returned convict must then cross the ideological and geographical boundaries that
have been erected against his repatriation. Those who returned were, as Magwitch
would have been had he survived, punished by death, for their re-entry signalled
not merely Britain's inability to exclude them, but also the nation's failure to
secure against the initial act of transgression.
In Great Expectations, the returned transport poses a challenge to both judicial
and narrative closure. Magwitch's exile from England replicates a politics of
exclusion stemming from the Edenic tradition of expulsion and ostracism from an
ideal society. Magwitch's presence draws attention to the shortcomings of the
fallen society responsible for his crimes and which has cast him out, just as in
Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend the often incredulous observations of the
returned travellers Arthur Clennam and John Harmon reveal the stasis of the
condition of England. Having worked in the East, identified as "the country of the
plague' [LD 15], Arthur returns to a Britain far more blighted than the China he
has left behind. His first impressions of the country he has not seen for twenty
years are of London as a city steeped in corruption and suffering, bearing more
than a passing resemblance to the Blakean city of the damned, and appearing in a
chapter ironically entitled 'Home':
In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning,
some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the
city and the deadcarts were going round...Nothing to breathe but streets,
streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing
for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with
the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best
of it. [LD 28]
This clever swipe at Sabbatarianism also, as George Levine has commented, brings
to mind the uncanny silence of a post-apocalyptic world.32 Arthur the outsider,
offers a new perspective on a city he had expected to be familiar, but which has
instead succumbed to stasis and decay. The dull cityscape with its metaphorical
dead carts recalls to the reader's mind the capital's ten thousand cholera victims of
1854, and the later descriptions of the prison-like city, in which no one will take
responsibility for anything seem to be a spilling over of the devastation of the

Crimean battlefields. Whilst this scene was the norm for Londoners of the 1850s,
for Arthur as the outsider it is new, remarkable and deeply depressing.
As a former convict, however, Magwitch occupies a far more complex
position than any of Dickens's other returning figures. He alone has been ejected
from the dystopian England that failed to provide for him, but to which he is
curiously drawn.33 Thus, his freedom of movement is restricted by the need for
concealment, leading to the lawyer Jaggers' constant reminder to Pip, 'You can't
have verbal communication with a man in New South Wales, you know' [GE 317].
For Dickens, then, in spite of its negligence as a parent, the mother country is still
perceived as a home to which the convict will want to return. However, as the
expatriate Australian cultural critic Robert Hughes has observed, having expelled
Magwitch as an undesirable element, Britain cannot expose herself to the risk of
'contamination' that would result from his repatriation:
Dickens knotted several strands in the English perception of convicts in
Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed, but they could
hardly, in a real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical,
legal sense, but what they suffered there warped them into permanent
outsiders. And yet they were capable of redemption—as long as they stayed
in Australia.34
As the repository of all the unwanted elements of society, including a large
number of criminals and the poor who could not succeed at home, Australia
becomes Pip's 'wicked Noah's ark' [GE 36] on a grand scale. In contrast to the
Australia of David Copperfield, this later vision of the country is no longer a land
of opportunity for even the most unlikely figures, but rather a dark, contaminated
place that it is worth risking death to escape. Alice Marwood in Dombey and Son
illustrates the problems inherent in the system of exiling criminals when she
laments, 'So Alice Marwood was transported, mother...and was sent to learn her
duty, where there was twenty times less duty, and more wickedness, and wrong,
and infamy, than here' [D&S 488], Indeed, as the nineteenth-century Australian
court clerk, George Dunderdale has recorded, it was commonly believed that once
they had been subjected to the ordeal of transportation and penal servitude, the
physiognomy of the convicts became marked with the evidence of suffering, and
by implication, also of guilt. According to Dunderdale:
The daily fear of the lash produced in the prisoners a peculiar expression of
countenance, and a cowed and slinking gait, which I have never seen in any
other man, white or black. And that gait and expression, like that of a dog
crouching at the heels of a cruel master in fear of the whip, remained still after
the prisoners had served the time of their sentences, and had recovered their
freedom. They never smiled, and could never regain the feelings and bearing
of free men; they appeared to feel on their faces the brand of Cain, by which
they were known to all men, and the scars left on their backs by the cruel lash
could never be smoothed away.35
Dunderdale's version of events is at odds with contemporary pseudo-science,
which would suggest that a propensity to crime could be detected in the face of the
offender. Here, it is the punitive system that is responsible for the psychological
and physical maiming which mark the convict's otherness. In effect, the convict
was rendered a perpetual outsider, excluded through recourse to the Bible,
culturally and geographically displaced, and ostracized from mainstream society
without hope of reintegration.
Dickens employs Magwitch's trial for returning to England in order to
demonstrate the inhumanity of a legal system which has erected these geopolitical
and social boundaries against its criminal class, and which repudiates the
possibility of rehabilitation. In his summing-up the Judge concedes of Magwitch,
'That miserable man would seem for a time to have become convinced of his
errors, when far removed from the scenes of his old offences, and to have lived a
peaceable and honest life' [GE 433-4], yet in spite of this admission that Magwitch
has abandoned crime, no tolerance is shown towards his decision to leave his
'haven of rest and repentance' [GE 434] and return to England. Dickens is
unquestionably sympathetic towards Magwitch and ponders with him, 'over the
question whether he might have been a better man under better circumstances' [GE
432], however, he neatly evades the problem of reintegration through allowing
Magwitch to die. It is here that the dilemma of the middle-class radical is
encapsulated: Dickens recognizes that Magwitch has contravened the laws of his
society and must therefore be punished by the Law, yet he also registers that far
from 'yielding to those propensities and passions, the indulgence of which had so
long rendered him a scourge to society' [GE 434], Magwitch is a victim of the
circumstances of his birth which made him the 'black slave' [GE 331] to the
younger, cleverer and more privileged Compeyson, and Magwitch's racialization
of class is a telling indicator of the extent of his alienation from mainstream
society. Dickens is unable to undermine the strength of the Law by allowing
Magwitch to evade capture and return to Australia with Pip, where they can play at
being gentlemen. However, he shows himself to be unwilling to comply with a
Gradgrindian system of discipline and punishment that takes account of no
circumstances other than ihefact of the crime. Dickens's Magwitch is therefore
left with no option other than to die before the state is able to inflict its own
degrading punishment upon him, and his creator can do no more than refer him to
divine justice.
The Empire, then, offered a means of dealing with the marginalized, the
outsider and the downright impoverished. In many ways it was a depressing state
of affairs for Dickens that the only way of immediately alleviating the effects of
poverty was to remove its victims from the nation state altogether. Just as in the
early 1850s he became disenchanted with the viability of emigration as a remedy
for social ills, so he became equally disillusioned with the governing classes whom
he felt should have been doing more to improve living conditions for those at the
bottom of the social strata. With this realization, his views on the British nation as
a whole became more and more despondent, so that in his eyes negligence and
apathy became an integral part of the national character.
Notes
1 Charles Wentworth Dilke. Greater Britain: A record of Travel in English-Speaking

Countries During 1866 and 1867. (Third edition). London: Macmillan & Co, 1869.
378.
2 Charlotte Erickson (ed.). Emigration from Europe 1815-1914: Selected Documents.
Documents in Economic History Series. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1976. 14.
3 Patrick Brantlinger. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. 12.
4 Asa Briggs. The Age of Improvement: 1783-1867. 1959. London: Longman, 1975.
388.
5 To W.J. Broderip, 26 July, 1850. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 6. 136. My
italics. All references to Dickens's letters refer to the Pilgrim edition unless stated
otherwise.
6 [Samuel Sidney] 'The Family Colonisation Loan Society'. Household Words. Volume
1, number 22. 24, August 1850, 514.
7 Caroline Chisholm. Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered in a Letter,
Dedicated, by Permission, to Earl Grey by Mrs Chisholm. London: John Olliver, 1847.
8 [Charles Dickens and Caroline Chisholm] 'A Bundle of Emigrants' Letters'.
Household Words. Volume 1, number 1. 30 March, 1850. 19. My brackets.
9 David Thomson. England in the Nineteenth Century: 1815-1914. The Pelican History
of England. 1950. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1970. 94.
10 See Leon Litvack. 'Dickens, Ireland, and the Irish'. The Dickensian Spring and
Summer 2003. I am grateful to Dr. Litvack for allowing me to see a copy of his
authoritative article prior to its publication.
11 Briggs. The Age of Improvement. 389.
12 Although America had ceased to be a colony of Britain in 1776, because of its relative
proximity to Britain, when compared to destinations such as Australia or New Zealand,
it remained a popular (and more economical) destination for emigrants.
13 Deirdre David. Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: North and South,
Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
14 David Lodge. Nice Work. 1988. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1989. 83.
15 Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Richard J. Dunn (ed.). New York and London:
W.W. Norton & Co, 1987. 364.
16 Elizabeth Gaskell. Mary Barton. 1848. Edgar Wright (ed.). Oxford: Oxford
17 [Samuel Sidney] 'An Australian Ploughman's Story'. Household Words. Volume 1,
number 2. April 6,1850. 39-43.
18 Coral Lansbury. Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-
Century English Literature. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970. 2.
19 Lansbury. Arcady in Australia. 136.
20 I am grateful to Professor John O. Jordan for suggesting this point to me at the Dickens
Project Winter Conference, U.C. Davis, February 1999.
21 Anthony Chennells 'Settlers and Savages in Dickens: Reading Multiple Centres' in
Wendy S. Jacobson. Dickens and the Children of Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2000. 159.
22 Charles Wentworth Dilke. 298.
23 [Samuel Sidney] 'Letters of Introduction to Sydney'. Household Words. Volume 2,
number 34. 16 November, 1850. 187-188.
24 [Samuel Sidney] 'Letters of Introduction to Sydney'. 188.

25 [John Capper and W.H. Wills] 'First Stage to Australia'. Household Words. Volume
8, number 181. 10 September, 1853. 43.
26 Thomas Campbell. 'Lines on the Departure of Emigrants for New South Wales'
(1828). In Chris Brooks & Peter Faulkner (ed.). The White Man's Burdens: An
Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996.
27 Jeremy Bentham. Quoted in Brantlinger. Rule of Darkness. 114.
28 Brantlinger. Rule of Darkness. 120.
29 MM Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vem W McGee. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds). Austin : University of Texas Press, 1986. xii.
30 Bakhtin. Speech Genres. 7.
31 Philip Collins. Dickens and Crime. Third Edition. 1962. Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1994. 7.
32 George Levine. 'Little Dorrit and Three Kinds of Science' in Joanne Shattock (ed.)
Dickens and Other Victorians: Essays in Honour of Philip Collins. 13.
33 The Australian novelist Peter Carey is somewhat incredulous at the convict's
compulsion to return 'home'. Hence, his superb 1997 reworking of Great
Expectations, Jack Maggs, depicts Maggs (the text's Magwitch figure), returning to
live out his days in comfort in a fertile and plentiful Australia that bears more than a
passing resemblance to Thomas Campbell's Arcadia. Peter Carey. Jack Maggs.
London: Faber & Faber, 1997.
34 Robert Hughes. Quoted in Edward W. Said. Culture & Imperialism, London: Chatto
&Windus, 1993. xvi.
35 George Dunderdale. The Book of the Bush: Containing Many Truthful Sketches of the
Early Colonial Life of Squatters, Whalers, Convicts, Diggers, and Others Who Left
Their Native Land and Never Returned. 1870. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin,
1973. 180.
Chapter 2
National Identity
'The idea of the nation, though a potent one, belongs to the imaginary rather than
the real'.1
'I like English people to be thorough English people, and not half English and half
I don't know what' [Mrs Nickleby, NN 640]
Imagining an Identity
Inextricably linked to the emigration question are the issues of national identity
and national prosperity—both of which were highly problematic categories for
Dickens. The complexity of his opinions on English national identity stem from
the ways in which the national sense of self was repeatedly re-fashioned
throughout Queen Victoria's reign, largely as a response to the rise of a capitalist
economy and the expansion of the Empire. As Peter Scott has so astutely
commented, "Britain is an invented nation, not so much older than the United
States9, and it is this process of invention that Dickens interrogates and analyzes
throughout his work.2
The very notion of an homogeneous national identity is an ideological
construct, seeking to promote unity where none exists—the nation itself is too vast
to be an actual community, so such feelings need to be fostered by playing upon
commonality and a sense of a shared group identity. As Anthony Smith has
suggested, class tensions may be obscured by the perpetuation of the myth of the
state as a 'super-family' whose members all occupy a position of either
dependency or responsibility within the unit, leading the hierarchy to seem
'natural'.3 As Britain's economy shifted towards industrial capitalism, with the
migration of the labour force from (he country to the cities, and the emergence of
an identifiable working class, the chasm between the two nations of rich and poor
became increasingly apparent. One means of deflecting attention from miserable
working conditions was through generating a sense of national pride, and while in
the early years of her reign, Victoria herself was regarded as a national icon, as
British colonial acquisition accelerated, the focus shifted to a celebration of
imperial holdings.4
Dickens concerned himself with national identity from the beginning of his
career. In the early novels, the English national aversion to anything foreign is
superbly lampooned. Characters like Mr Lillyvick in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-
1839) ask absurdly xenophobic questions like, 'What sort of language do you
consider French, sir?' [NN 203] and make assertions such as, 'Lo, eh? I don't
think anything of that language—nothing at all' [NN 204], yet they are harmless
questions coming from innocuous comic figures. As if to demonstrate the ongoing

nature of this concern, Mr Lillyvick is reincarnated nearly twenty years later in
Little Dorrifs Mrs Plornish, a woman who confidently believes that she is able to
speak Italian, when she can decidedly do nothing of the sort. Undoubtedly another
humorous character, her presence in the later novel is not so incidental as that of
Lillyvick. Moreover, her failure to communicate is linked to the wider themes of
the work and Dickens's deeper anxieties of the 1850s, particularly at the way
people fail to connect to one another.
Dickens's own position in relation to national identity is of particular interest
when one considers the role of the serial novelist in creating what Benedict
Anderson has labelled an 'imagined community'. Dickens's work fused, and
indeed continues to fuse, the national and the popular in that its mass appeal
created a community of readers from all classes and diverse nations. According to
Anderson's assertion that 'large cultural systems' precede the rise of nationalism (I
am reading national identity here as a diluted form of nationalism), through cheap
serial publication Dickens was able to transcend existing intellectual and class
demarcations. Such class delineations are all too often dependent upon the
exclusion of groups unfamiliar with a particular body of work. In many ways
Household Words, and its successor, All the Year Round were levelling forces and,
following on from the success of periodical publications like Bentley's Miscellany,
made the novel widely available to the working classes on an unprecedented scale.
In 1837 the circulation of The Pickwick Papers (which sold at the cost of one
shilling per monthly issue) reached over 20,000 copies per month, and by the time
of the last number it had doubled to 40,000.5 As Robert Patten puts it, 'subsequent
to Dickens's success with Pickwick, parts publication became for thirty years a
chief means of democratizing and enormously expanding the Victorian book-
reading and book-buying public'.6 Indeed, the numerous anecdotes surrounding
the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop—the judge and critic Lord
Jeffery in tears, the Irish political activist Daniel O'Connell hurling the book from
the window of a railway train, crowds waiting on the docks in New York City to
discover Nell's fate—emphasize the unprecedented diversity of his readership.
Dickens was writing of the people for the people and he also frequently used his
works as a podium from which to address the state of the nation and to call for
reform. His own sense of both the incredible breadth of his readership and of his
work's role in pointing to reform is conveyed superbly in Bleak House (1851-
1853) when the authoritative voice of the omniscient narrator states dispassionately
on the death of Jo, the crossing sweeper: 'Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and
gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead,
men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus
around us every day' [BH 649]. The bald statement of simple facts in this passage
is more effective than any angry or sentimental discourse, and the fact that it
addresses every level of society from the Queen to the ordinary men and women is
demonstrative of Dickens's conception of a cross-class society of readers.
Whilst Dickens brought readers of different classes into a common sphere, his
fiction did not attempt to obscure divisions within the nation state. His
National Identity 23
representations of the dispossessed, moreover, endeavoured to subvert the nation's

constructed view of itself as prosperous and somehow 'elect'. Nineteenth-century
London was truly, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has labelled it, the 'capital of poverty' ,
and this view is certainly endorsed by the scenes of penury in Nicholas Nickleby
where the national mask of prosperity is shown to have slipped:
The rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttered in the rich light that showed the
goldsmith's treasures; pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows
where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded
by one thin sheet of brittle glass—an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering
figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India. There
was a christening party at the largest coffin-maker's and a funeral hatchment
had stopped some great improvements in the bravest mansion. Life and death
went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side; repletion and
starvation laid them down together. [NN 409]
In this passage, the city is notable only for its abject squalor and misery and there
is no more telling difference than that between the shivering huddled paupers and
the rich imperial trappings in the shop window. Dickens's London is here
remarkably similar to William Blake's city of the damned, and clearly anticipates
the Babylonian city of Bleak House. As the century progressed and overseas
colonies were accumulated with increasing rapidity, the British sense of self
became inextricably linked to both the Empire and Britain's success as a trading
nation. Dickens reads beneath the superficial prosperity of the city and implicit
within his reading is the fact that the national wealth is based upon, not simply the
ornate products of India and China, but far more significantly on an impoverished
workforce—in short, London is the 'capital of capital' precisely because it is the
capital of poverty.8 The city that the preposterous Mr Podsnap of Our Mutual
Friend was later to extol as bearing strong evidence of the English Constitution is
exposed as a site of marked class divisions, reinforced by a so-called 'national'
prosperity that enhances the wealth of the few. Indeed, Dickens's view of the
wealth of the nation may be neatly aligned with Sissy Jupe's misapprehension of
the Benthamite principles of political economy in Hard Times when she declares:
I thought I couldn't know if it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I
was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and
whether any of it was mine. [HT 57]
In other words, for Dickens the nation cannot be considered prosperous when its
wealth is grounded in suffering, and, like Sissy, he is bewildered at the thought that
anyone could argue otherwise.
The idea of a tainted wealth—and hence a tainted nation—surfaces repeatedly
throughout the trajectory of Dickens's writing, most notably in Great Expectations
(1860-1861). The idea that Pip's wealth is somehow contaminated, not by
criminal labour, but by the society that reduced Magwitch, his benefactor to a state
of criminality introduces the idea that almost all money is tainted by the sufferings
of the workforce. It is in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), though, that Dickens
most forcibly confronts the origins of national wealth through his depictions of
circulating cash. The stock market capital of characters like the Veneerings is
almost mystical in its unreality, and the reader is confronted with money that has
originated in the excremental dust mounds of Harmony Jail, an allegory for the
excremental nature of capital based on exploitation. The most significant
representation of capital, however, is the worthless waste paper blowing through
the empty, soulless streets of the capital, symbolizing the circulation of empty
signifiers around the body politic. Patrick Brantlinger has expressed the opinion
that, 'the Victorian novel simultaneously registers both the substantiality of British
power and prosperity and its ^substantiality, its basis only in "credit" and "debt",
in part by metaphorizing its own lack of reality (its fictionality) as no different
from that of money (always a form of debt)'.9 Brantlinger's identification of the
paradoxical substantial, yet insubstantial existence based on a credit that is, by its
very nature, illusory (whether for the novel, as he suggests, or for the society which
bases its identity in prosperity) is an important one. If the identity of the nation is
constructed around a myth of affluence in danger of collapse at any time, then that
sense of identity will inevitably be unstable in the extreme. Thus, protagonists like
Podsnap, who constantly insist upon the innate superiority of the English, arise in
Dickens's fiction as caricatures of the national response to this constant,
underlying threat of disintegration. Malcolm Andrews has observed that:
Part of the national distrust of foreigners that Dickens deplores depends on the
sense that the Englishman has that, just as England is the centre of civilisation
(as London is the "world's metropolis9), so the Englishman himself represents
the moral norm for civilised man. Other countries are judged as deviations in
varying degrees from this norm.10
Yet Dickens's attempts to dismantle the English sense of inherent superiority go
beyond even the 'distrust' to which Andrews alludes. When Podsnap tediously
boasts, 'there is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an
independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of everything
calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek
in vain among the other nations of the earth' [OMF133], he seems to be protesting
too much. He does not simply anticipate the jingoists of the 1870s in his national
pride, he also represents an upholder of the fragile fiction of English greatness.
Moreover, fictions of this nature are rendered absurd through preposterous,
unsustainable pronouncements like Podsnap's repeated insistence that the poor are
'Not English' [OMF 128].
If Dickens was alarmed by the nationalistic tendencies of Britain's Podsnaps,
or the elusive and transient nature of the finance capital on which the nations's
pretensions to world leadership were based, he was nevertheless complicit in the
wilful invention of a national identity. A Child's History of England (1851-3, but
further instalments were published sporadically thereafter) exemplifies this process
of fabrication and shows how Dickens's own sense of a national identity could
only be achieved through a reconstruction of the past. However, the most
important facet of the History is the means by which it attempts to show an
historical precedence for Britain's position in the nineteenth-century world order.
The very act of writing such a history is bound up with the process of instilling a
sense of national worth. Dickens's History begins with a description of Britain's
humble origins, with the clear aim of demonstrating the 'self-made' and insular
nature of the nation:
The Islands lay solitary, in the great expanse of water...but the winds and
waves brought no adventurers to land upon the Islands, and the savage
Islanders knew nothing of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world knew
nothing of them [CHE 129].
The England that Dickens depicts offers a marked contrast to the England of the
1850s, which stresses the island's progress from these solitary beginnings, along
with the stoicism of the English. Later, in his account of the Roman invasion he
emphasizes the stubborn bravery of the British and their unwillingness to concede
defeat. Interestingly, he also suggests that Napoleon Bonaparte could have
expressed similar sentiments, revealing his vision of history to be somehow
circular or repetitive. While looking back on the same constitutional history as the
Young England movement led by Benjamin Disraeli, Dickens's sense of the
British as striving ever further forward is directly at odds with Disraeli's nostalgia
for a mythical pre-Conquest England in which all were free. One of the basic
arguments of deniers of the Conquest was that feudalism had been transplanted to
England by the Normans, and that the true Saxon English had been landowners,
not crown tenants. Thus, for Disraeli and his ilk, a landed interest, namely the
aristocracy, was needed to provide stability and continuity for the nation.11
Disraeli's Sybil—who is so obsessed with a return to Anglo-Saxon values that she
even names her dog Harold—states:
When I remember what this English people once was; the truest, the freest,
and the bravest, the best-natured and the best-looking, the happiest and most
religious race upon the surface of this globe; and think of them now, with all
their crimes and all their slavish sufferings, their soured spirits and their
stunted forms; their lives without enjoyment, and their deaths without hope; I
may well feel for them, even if I were not the daughter of their blood.12
Dickens's own impatience with such regressive thinking is perhaps best
encapsulated by the titles of the imitation books he had painted on the door of his
study at Gad's Hill: 'The Wisdom of Our Ancestors (Vol. 1 Ignorance; Vol. 2
Superstition; Vol. 3 The Block; Vol. 4 The Stake; Vol. 5 The Rack; Vol. 6 Dirt;
Vol. 7 Disease)9.13 Admittedly, he does suggest that William the Conqueror and
his line were ruthless autocrats who spent their time, 'struggling to maintain what
[they] had seized' [CHE 179]. Nevertheless, Dickens does not allow himself to be
swept away in a fit of what Simon Gikandi refers to as 'historical elision and
amnesia' in idealizing a distant and lost past.14
The type of history that Dickens is engaged in writing is what Anthony Smith
has labelled a 'myth of ethnic election' in that he examines the past to discover
precedents for England's present supremacy.15 Curiously, he devotes just four
pages to the period from the Glorious Revolution to the accession of Queen
Victoria, whose reign he glosses with the words, 'She is very good, and much
beloved' [CHE 531]. Although this precis has been attributed to time constraints,
it also demonstrates Dickens's over-riding concern to cement the present identity
by grounding it in that which has gone before. Dickens's attitude towards history
and its relation to the present was to darken considerably in the last years of his
life. In his final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, he no longer lauds the
courage of ancestral figures like Boadicea, but instead equates the complacent and
decadent British society with the Roman Empire through Silas Wegg's
(misleading of Gibbon. Mr Boffin's nightly sessions of declining and falling,
along with the Veneerings's interminable round of dinner parties seem almost to
constitute fiddling while Rome burns. The fundamental stasis of all of the later
characters who remain in their own solipsistic spheres is akin to that of the middle
classes who were, in Dickens's opinion, failing to live up to their responsibilities.
It is for this reason that Dickens's reappraisal of the past was therefore not a static
process. His assessment of the nation's identity was continually adapted
throughout his work, whether he was examining the past or, as was more frequent
in his work, the present.
The Icon of the Nation

'Home, Home, Home, sweet Home!...Be it ever...ever so ghastly, all things considered
there's no place like it' [Silas Wegg, OA4F499]
By 1851 Britain's growing emphasis on national identity had assumed a physical

existence in the form of what Punch's Douglas Jerrold christened the Crystal
Palace. Both an international trade fair and an attempt to promote world peace, the
exhibition was primarily an assertion of Britain's claim to world leadership. Prince
Albert had been a key figure in the rapid organization of the display of the works
and industries of all nations. Inspired by the Paris exhibitions, the British venture
was unique in that all nations were invited to contribute their wares. Planning
meetings took place early in 1850 and eventually the Duke of Devonshire's
gardener Joseph Paxton supplied the designs for a prefabricated building to
temporarily house the exhibition, but which could be removed and reassembled
elsewhere once the spectacle had closed. The Exhibition was opened by Queen
Victoria on 1 May 1851 and attracted nearly six million visitors (this figure
includes repeat visits) before it closed on 11 October of the same year. In his
introduction to the official catalogue Henry Cole, a key figure in the organization
of the display, explained the Exhibition's importance to Britain's sense of itself as
a world leader:
The activity of the present day chiefly develops itself in commercial history,
and it is in accordance with the spirit of the age that the nations of the world
have now collected together their choicest productions. // may be said without
presumption, that an event like this Exhibition could not have taken place at
any earlier period, and perhaps not among any other people than ourselves.
The friendly confidence reposed by other nations in our institutions; the
perfect security for property; the commercial freedom, and the facility of
transport, which England pre-eminently possesses, may all be brought forward
as causes which have operated in establishing the Exhibition in London. Great
Britain offers a hospitable invitation to all the nations of the world, to collect
and display the choicest fruits of that industry in her Capital; and the invitation
is freely accepted by every civilized people, because the interest both of the
guest and its host is felt to be reciprocal.16
The palace itself was to become an icon for the entire Victorian era, and the
Exhibition as a whole reveals a great deal about how the Victorians perceived
themselves. With thirteen thousand exhibitors and the participation of thirty-two
nations, the Exhibition was unquestionably a popular success.17 Cole, spoke of
the hope that the public would identify itself with the Great Exhibition, and in this
respect the Crystal Palace may be seen as an attempt to both forge and project a
sense of national unity and pride.
The years preceding the Exhibition had been difficult times for the nation.
Britain had been deep in recession from 1837 until 1843, and the economy suffered
another dip in 1847-8. 1848, of course, signalled the last Chartist rally on
Kennington Common. The fact that 10,000 special constables were drafted in to
deal with the anticipated violence of what was essentially a peaceful gathering,
demonstrates the deep class tensions that still prevailed. 1848 was also the year of
revolutions in France, Prussia, Austria and the Italian states, and there were
concerns that such fervour would spread to Britain. The Crystal Palace may in
many ways be viewed as a response to such events, and it signalled an attempt to
leave the 'hungry forties' behind. The Exhibition thus became the material
embodiment of an ideology of unity in its bid to emphasize national achievements
and bring all classes together under one roof.18
Dickens's own imaginative involvement with the Great Exhibition is
extremely complex. Originally a member of the Central Committee of the
Working Classes for the Great Exhibition (a rather reactionary working group
established in 1850 to prevent an uprising of the lower orders which was believed
would result from attempts to exclude them from the spectacle), Dickens was
instrumental in dissolving the group four months after it had been set up. His main
quarrel with the committee was that it was too absorbed in the display itself, and
not concerned with ameliorating conditions in the nation as a whole. His
objections to the Crystal Palace are stated in no uncertain terms when in Household
Words at the beginning of 1851 he contended, in the persona of the outgoing year,
that an alternative exhibition of poverty should take place, and demanded:
Which of my children shall behold the Princes, Prelates, Nobles, Merchants,
of England equally united, for another Exhibition—for a great display of
England's sins and negligence, to be, by steady contemplation of all eyes and
steady union of all hands, set right?19
These alternative exhibits clearly had no place in the display at Hyde Park, and
Dickens was clearly anxious that the neglected poor did not constitute a spectacle
that could be viewed by any other than the intrepid few, prepared to venture into
the slum districts. As early as 1843 his friend Thomas Carlyle had also attacked a
society in which 'the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely
unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us...to be heart-worn, weary,
yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold universal laissez-faire'.20 In Dickens's
imagination the Crystal Palace metamorphosed into the epitome of such

negligence, as is highlighted by the juxtaposition of a Household Words article,
'The Great Exhibition and the Little One' with a poem entitled 'The Claims of
Labour'.21 The poem stresses the basic good nature of the poor, which is warped
through their struggle for survival from day to day. The poem urges not simply the
provision of material aid, but it also asserts: 'Unlock the jealous treasure-vaults of
Arty And spread their wealth before the sons of Labour;/ That all may find in
every crowded mart/ Topics for wholesome converse with their neighbour./ Let
Printing multiply the works of Mind,/ To form their taste, and guide them to
reflection;/ Thought is the common heirloom of mankind,/No privilege of any
favour'd section'.22 Thus, 'The Claims of Labour' constitutes an urge to the
administrators of the Exhibition not to restrict their efforts towards improvement to
mere shilling days, but to exert themselves to achieve genuine, lasting reform and
the democratization of culture.
In the Exhibition catalogue, Henry Cole wrote proudly of 'The great
constitutional freedom which this country enjoys [which] may be ascribed in some
measure to the reluctance which the Government always shows to act on behalf of
the people when it is possible they can act for themselves'.23 Indeed, it is here that
the ideological discrepancies between Dickens's view of the Exhibition and the
intentions of its organizers are most apparent. For Dickens, laissez-faire comments
like Cole's were an abomination and demonstrated the ways in which the state was
falling short of its obligations to the people. In his view, the vast exposition at
Hyde Park was what the 'resurrection man' Jerry Cruncher would describe as a
'blind', which attempted to distract the attention of the people from the miseries in
which they were living, and as Benjamin Disraeli freely admitted it was 'a godsend
to the Government...diverting public attention from their blunders' [see Figure
2.1].24 While Disraeli's comments are loaded with the ironic self-parody of the
cynical politician, Dickens would have been all too willing to accept them as true.
Dickens was extremely sceptical as to the success of attempts to involve the
working classes in the Exhibition and spoke out against the projected 'shilling
days' on which they would be admitted for a reduced rate. He also feared that
members of the workforce would feel cheated or disappointed by what they saw.
As he commented to W.H. Wills:
I have always had an instinctive feeling against the Exhibition, of a faint,
inexplicable sort. I have a great confidence in its being a correct one
somehow or other—perhaps it was a foreshadowing of its bewilderment of the
public. My apprehension—and prediction—is, that they will come out of it at
last, with that feeling of boredom and lassitude (to say nothing of having spent
their money) that the reaction will not be as wholesome and vigorous and
quick, as folks expect.25
As well as disliking the physical appearance of Paxton's remarkable structure,
Dickens's phenomenal imagination was simply not stimulated by the icon of
national identity and oneness. In addition to the visit he paid to the palace in the
February before its completion, he ventured into the exhibition itself twice. He
found the experience totally bewildering and commented that its visual impact was
overwhelming in the extreme:

I have a natural horror of sights and the fusion of so many sights in one has
not decreased it. I am not sure that I have seen anything but the fountain and
perhaps the Amazon. It is a dreadful thing to be obliged to be false, but when
anyone says, "Have you seen?" I say "Yes", because if I don't I know he'll
explain it.26
It would seem rather an anomaly that one who was so exhilarated by the riot and
disorder of the streets would be repelled by a profusion of objects, amongst which
were statues of two characters from his own work, Oliver Twist and Little Nell.27
Moreover, his observation that he is naturally horrified at sights is frankly untrue,
for Dickens was well known for his love of the theatrical spectacle. It would seem
that Dickens was in fact disappointed by the Exhibition, which seemed to him a
type of false promise. The display had seemed to offer everything, but instead it
presented a proliferation of largely static, taxonomized exhibits, which did not
appeal to him in the slightest. Indeed, a glance at the catalogue reveals the sheer
number of "things', and what, for someone as easily bored as Dickens, would have
been the repetitious nature of some of the exhibits. For instance, the literally
hundreds of entries for objects such as horseshoes would have held no interest
whatsoever for a writer with a dynamic imagination which throve on the frenetic
activity of the streets. One of the most telling anecdotes Dickens offers about the
Exhibition is a story he recounts in a letter to Mrs Richard Watson about a school
outing arranged by his friend Angela Burdett Courts:
One School was composed of a hundred "Infants"—who got among the
horses' legs, in crossing to the main entrance from the Kensington Gate, and
came walking out from between the wheels of coaches, undisturbed in
mind...One infant strayed. He was not missed. Ninety and nine were taken
home, supposed to be the whole collection, but this particular infant went to
Hammersmith. He was found by the police at night. When his mother came
for him in the morning he asked when it would be over. It was a Great
Exhibition, he said, but he thought it long!28
In addition to its charm, this story offers an important insight into what, for
Dickens, constituted a true Great Exhibition, which did not restrict the imagination
and in which novelty could always be found. In short, the enormous, sprawling
metropolis. It is therefore hardly a surprise that Dickens became involved in a
process of re-evaluation which involved the reinterpretation and reinvention of the
Crystal Palace.
From the very outset, Dickens was able to see what Punch referred to as 'A
Gap in the Great Exhibition' due to the absence of a 'Benevolent Machine'.29
However, as the incompetence and negligence of the governing classes became
increasingly apparent in the 1850s with events like the Crimean War and the Indian
Mutiny, the immense greenhouse in Hyde Park came for Dickens to epitomize all
that was wrong with society. As Hillis Miller has suggested, his title, Bleak House
is a synechdochic representation of both the Crystal Palace, and at the other end of
the spectrum, its dark others, the workhouse and Tom-AH-Alone's.30 A logical
development of this theory extends to encompass all of the pessimistic works of
the 1850s and to suggest that for Dickens, the Crystal Palace became an icon of all
the institutions of 'HOW NOT TO DO IT' [LD 104]. It is a testimony to
Dickens's confused and depressed state of mind during this decade that he adopted
an exhibition noteworthy for its success and rapid organization and distorted it into
a signifier of national incompetence. Of course this reconfiguration is likely to
have stemmed from the belief that a nation able to manage such a spectacle should
also be able to organize a war, or tackle urban poverty and sanitation. However, in
his fiiry at what he saw as the nation's mistaken priorities, these different
arguments became increasingly blurred.
Dickens's Two Nations
'Men are of the same nation if and only if they recognize each other as being from the
same nation'31
"The day begins to break now; and in truth it might be better for the national glory even
that the sun should sometimes set upon the British dominions, than that it should ever
rise upon so vile a wonder as Tom'. [BH 628]
It is extremely difficult to define Dickens's exact stance in relation to the urban

poor, as his attitude toward them was ambiguous in the extreme. On the one hand,
he felt a deep-rooted compassion towards them that is conveyed throughout the
novels. His outrage at the chasm between the advantages of the wealthy and the
privations of the poor was a recurring source of anguish to him, as is registered in
the descriptions of the rookery Tom-AH-Alone's in Bleak House (1851-1853). Yet
his work also manifests both a fear of and at times even a contempt for the urban
poor, particularly when they are combined en masse, whether as Chartists, rioters
or trade unionists. The scenes depicting the urban 'mob' of both Barnaby Rudge
(1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) epitomize the way such groups
simultaneously repelled, alarmed and fascinated Dickens. However, it is in The
Old Curiousity Shop (1840-1841), where Nell and her grandfather pass through an
industrial city, that these contradictions are most apparent:
But, night-time in this dreadful spot!...when the people near them looked
wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed labourers paraded the
roads, or clustered by torch-light round their leaders, who told them, in stern
language, of their wrongs, and urged them on to frightful cries and threats;
when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and
prayers of women who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror
and destruction, to work no ruin so surely as their own—night, when carts
came rumbling, filled with rude coffins (for contagious disease and death had
been busy with the living crops); when orphans cried, and distracted women
shrieked and followed in their wake—night, when some called for bread, and
some for drink to drown their cares, and some with tears, and some with
staggering feet, and some with bloodshot eyes, went brooding home—night,
which, unlike the night that Heaven sends on earth, brought with it no peace,
nor quiet, nor signs of blessed sleep—who shall tell the terrors of the night to
the young wandering child? [OCS 336]
The description here begins with the terrific sight of the rampant Chartists and the
terror generated by their activities, the tone of the paragraph shifts rapidly to an
explanation of the conditions responsible for their discontent. The narrative voice
is undoubtedly still afraid of these 'terrible banditti9, who are remarkable for an
otherness that inspires fear, through wildness and savagery.32 Yet at the same
time, the narrator seeks to probe beneath the initial response evoked by their
frightening facade to demonstrate the desperation that has driven these men to such
a course of action.
Dickens is unquestionably sympathetic towards the inhabitants who subsist in
the "noise and dirt and vapour of the great manufacturing town, reeking with lean
misery and hungry wretchedness, [which] hemmed them in on every side, and
seemed to shut out hope, and render escape impossible9 [OCS 334], yet he also
reinforces the otherness of the 'Men, women children, wan in their looks, ragged in
attire' [OCS 335] by referring to them as 'wild9 and 'savage9. To image the urban
poor as a separate and savage race was a popular trope employed by many
Victorian novelists and campaigners for social reform including Henry Mayhew,
and later in the century Margaret Harkness and General Booth. The use of such
discourse served several purposes and on one level it sought to reveal the true
depth of the divisions between the classes, by suggesting that the poor were a
'race9 apart in need of missionary aid. Jo, 'our dear brother9 [BH138] exemplifies
the construction of the urban pauper as other:
Jo is brought in. He is not one of Mrs Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is
not one of Mrs Jellyby's lambs; being wholly unconnected with Borrioboola-
Gha; he is not softened by distance and unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine
foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly,
disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common
streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites
devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him: native
ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature
lower than the beasts that perish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising colours!
From the sole of thy foot to the crown of thy head, there is nothing interesting
about thee! [BH 640-41]
Here, Dickens describes Jo in negatives to demonstrate that it is because he is one
of many 'dying thus around us every day9 [BH 649], so lacking in novelty and
exoticism that no one will take responsibility for his welfare. The narrative voice
almost revels in Jo's unpleasantness and negates attempts to romanticize an
underclass dwelling in fundamentally repulsive conditions by eliding the many
unpleasant traits that are the signs of its penury. In this respect, Dickens's use of
colonial language differs markedly to that of other contemporary sources, although
it is akin to that of Mayhew. In this instance he inverts the dominant discourse by
emphasizing Jo's essential 'homeliness9 at the same time as registering the
paradoxical otherness that renders him a race apart. Indeed, the reference to Jo as a
'home-made article' seems to be deliberately adopting the rhetoric of the Great

Exhibition Catalogue and making him an article for display. Punch adopted a
similar strategy with its 1850 cartoon, 'Specimens from Mr Punch's Industrial
Exhibition of 1850' [Figure 2.2], in which, rather than British goods and labour-
saving industrial tools, workers whose working conditions are unregulated by the
state are displayed to Prince Albert one of the founders of the Great Exhibition, as
an alternative spectacle, and a much less familiar one.
A more typical account of working class 'savagery' is Watts Phillips' The
Wild Tribes of London (1855) in which the criminal elements of the urban poor are
dwelt upon, and the narrator adopts a sensationalist tone as he piles degradation
upon degradation:
[W]ithin the limited precincts of these few wretched courts exists vice of every
kind, ruffianism of every hue; no wretch so foul, but here may find a refuge
and a 'home'. They swarm with dirty unwashed men, who bear, Cain-like, on
every brow a brand that warns you to avoid them—with rude, coarse women,
whose wild language, fierce eyes, and strange lascivious gestures strike terror
to the spectator's heart—with children who bear the tell-tale marks of the
prison scissors in their ill-cut hair. Such courts are the headquarters of filth
and fever, the abiding places of ignorance, the nursery of crime.. ,33
Although this passage ostensibly comes from a section calling for social reform, its
effect is to render the poor totally abhorrent to the reader. The narrator takes a
salacious enjoyment in cataloguing the misery and squalor, whilst dismissing the
impoverished inhabitants—who have no alternative other than to turn to crime—as
bearing marks of pre-destined damnation. The language is sensationalist and while
Dickens attempts to expose injustice, Phillips' s narrator is much more judgmental,
emphasizing the filth and squalor of the scene, without analyzing the root causes.
In the short article 'Sensational Savages', written on the occasion of the
amalgamation of the Anthropological and Ethnographical Societies, Punch
proposed a fact-finding expedition to the little-explored recesses of the East End of
London:
We suppose that we should be called Philistine if we hinted that the clever
men who entertain themselves with the doings of foreign savages, might be
quite as usefully occupied in helping us to see what we can do for civilising
savages at home. We assure them they would lose none of the excitement
they covet; we pledge ourselves that from Tiger Bay and similar dens, they
shall obtain quite as revolting details as from any Eastern island. And, as for
the Bible, we assure them that there are places in London which would
impress them with the conviction that no such thing had ever been seen in the
first city in the world, except at the Police Court. Suppose they give one
session to the heathen at the East End; and, if it prove a dull one, they can
revert to the foreign savages.34
Whereas Dickens attempts to assert a common nationality and humanity between
THE SHIPWBECKED MINISTERS SAVED BY THE GREAT EXHIBITION STEAMER.
2.1 'The Shipwrecked Ministers Saved by the Great Exhibition

Steamer9. Punch. Volume 20,1851. 237.
Reproduced with permission tot Punch Ltd.
SPECIMENS FBOM MR PUNCH'S INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION OF 1850,

(TO BE IMPROVED IN 1851).
2.2 "Specimens from Mr. Punch's Industrial Exhibition of 1850'. Punch.

Volume 18,1850. 145.
Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd.
the revolting Jo and his readers, the Punch article employs a process of
defamiliarization to demonstrate the need for charity to begin at home. While
Dickens himself was unquestionably concerned with the improvement of
conditions, novelists in the latter part of the nineteenth century, like George
Gissing, became involved in debates surrounding the racial categorization of the
working classes and what was perceived as their inherent inability to transcend any
state of degradation. Punch too wished to prompt those in positions of authority
and responsibility to take action, yet according to Tim Dolin, those who resorted to
the discourse of race often had a much more sinister agenda. From the 1830s
onward there arose from the work of the social reformers Edwin Chadwick and
Henry Mayhew a class referred to by Dolin as the 'literary poor' and he suggests
that, 'The living conditions and habits of the lower classes were constantly being
compared with those of savage races, but the racial analogy, as well as carrying
infectious and miscegenous implications undermined the very idea of social
reform9.35 Hence permitting a justification of negligence on the grounds that those
belonging to the underclass could never be raised from their degradation,
regardless of the efforts of well-intentioned reformers. Dickens was far less brutal
and certainly less bound up in pursuing a proto-Darwinian argument using natural
selection to rationalize official neglect. Instead he emphasized the need for
philanthropic action, rather than the mere observation practised by the
anthropological societies. Implicit within his call to the middle and upper classes
to act on what he regarded as their responsibilities was the certainty that such a
course of action would keep the working classes from rising up and seizing what
had been denied to them. Social reform was thus a preventative measure that
made good economic sense, as well as a matter of basic human compassion
towards the less well-off.
It was Benjamin Disraeli who most explicitly and famously defined the poor
as somehow separate to the rest of society in his 1845 novel, Sybil in which the
reluctant Chartist, Stephen Morley, defines Britain as consisting of:
Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are
as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were
dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed
by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different
manners, and are not governed by the same laws...THE RICH AND THE
POOR.36
Dickens was undoubtedly complicit in this construction of the poor (particularly
those who dwelt in the cities) as other, in spite of his repeated calls for reform.
Dickens frequently employs descriptions of the working classes as almost sub-
human, as in Barnaby Rudge (1841), when the locksmith Gabriel Varden is
terrified by the violent crowd: 'He had never loved his life so well as then, but
nothing could move him. The savage faces that glared upon him, look where he
would; the cries of those who thirsted, like wild animals, for his blood; the sight of
men pressing forward, and trampling down their fellows, as they strove to reach
him, and struck at him above the heads of other men, with axes and with iron
bars...' [BR 490],37 In this scene it is the destructive and violent energy of the
mob when roused which reinforces their otherness. However, the degrading living
conditions which have compelled them to riot are stressed in A Christmas Carol
when The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come compels Scrooge to journey through
the slums:
The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people
half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many
cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the
straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth and
misery [CB 61].
Here, the description positively oozes with urban pestilence and decay, and plays
upon the reader's olfactory sensibilities to an overwhelming degree. The urgent
need for reform could hardly be stressed with greater impact—one can almost
smell the degradation.
Part of Dickens's mission, as he perceived it, was to reform the reformers.
Even in his earliest work he reveals an impatience with those 'telescopic
philanthropists' who neglect domestic concerns and direct their efforts overseas.
In his correspondence he speaks of missionaries as "perfect nuisances who leave
every place worse than they find it' and goes on to assert that, 'The work at home
must be completed thoroughly, or there is no hope abroad'.38 Mrs Jellyby of Bleak
House may be the 1850s exemplar of domestic negligence in favour of overseas
aid, but telescopic philanthropy is an issue even for the aptly named Mudfog
Association of Sketches by Boz (1833-1836) when its members examine Mr
Tickle's specially tinted spectacles, based upon the principle of the human eye and
enabling a viewer to be blind to close objects (or problems) but offering clarity of
vision over long distances:
Mr Tickle was rather astonished to hear this, when the President could not fail
to be aware that a large number of most excellent persons and great statesmen
could see, with the naked eye, most marvellous horrors on West India
plantations, while they could discern nothing whatever in the interior of
Manchester cotton mills. He must know, too, with what quickness of
perception most people could discover their neighbour's faults, and how very
blind they were to their own. If the President differed from the great majority
of men in this respect, his eye was a defective one, and it was to assist his
vision that these glasses were made. [SBB 662]
In this early depiction of the vice, Dickens uses humour to highlight the absurdity
at beginning remedial work so far away from home. However, signs of his later
impatience are already coming to the fore in The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837)
when Sam Weller's outspoken father, Tony, declares:
wot aggrawates me, Samivel, is to see 'em a wastin' all their time and labour
in making clothes for copper-coloured people as don't want 'em, and taking
no notice of flesh-coloured Christians as I do. If I'd my vay, Samivel, I'd just
stick some o' these here lazy shepherds behind a heavy wheelbarrow, and run
'em up and down a fourteen inch-wide plank all day. That 'ud shake the
nonsense out of 'em, if anythin' vould. [PP 371]
Tony's recognition of the urban poor as 'flesh-coloured like him' exemplifies
Dickens's attempts to assert a community based on nationality and his recognition

that the inhabitants of the slum areas were just as much a part of the nation as he
was himself. Ironically, the later Mrs Jellyby of Bleak House elides this collective
identity founded in race when she describes her project to Esther Summerson:
The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in
correspondence with public bodies, and with private individuals anxious for
the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say that it is
advancing. [BH37, my italics]
By the time of Bleak House (1852-3) Dickens's frustration with the policy of
domestic laissez-faire—in his view a euphemism for downright negligence—had
become so overwhelming that he could only envisage the British nation as Mrs
Jellyby's home, and the dispossessed as analogous to her disregarded children.
The disorder of the Jellyby household is, of course, equivalent to the dilapidated
state of the nation, and Caddy Jellyby identifies its ruin as resulting from her
mother's exertions overseas when she laments, "Ma and Africa, together, upset the
whole house directly...Ma's ruinous to everything' [BH 420]. Even the static,
bewildered Mr Jellyby, who refers to his children as 'Wild Indians' [BH 416],
becomes caught up in the complex discourse of displacement which figures those
at home as equally in need, if not more so, of the charity so freely given to the
colonized.
Dickens was certainly able to conceive of the problems that would result from
the application of his colonialist discourse in the public sphere. In his creation of
Esther Summerson he demonstrates that simply to colonize or annex the urban
poor, like Jo the crossing sweeper, by drawing them into the middle-class home did
not constitute a satisfactory solution. Such a course of action would ameliorate the
effects of poverty for those fortunate enough to be 'annexed', without addressing
die conditions that had placed them in need of charity in the first place.39 What
Dickens hoped to break was the self-perpetuating cycle of charity epitomized by
Esther's individual good works. He was, of course, aware that a sudden and
sweeping change was not practicable and that selective benevolence like that of Mr
Pickwick, or the more sinister interning tendencies of Esther did a great deal to
alleviate suffering. However, he was also concerned that such acts eased the
pressure on the Government to take remedial steps and to abandon its dangerous
policy of laissez-faire. Esther's own philanthropy was posited as more pertinent
and useful than that of Mrs Jellyby, but it too belonged to the colonial school and
therefore its ambiguities and inconsistencies had to be drawn out.
When faced with those who immersed themselves in the claims of overseas
'savages', it is of little surprise that Dickens resorted to a metaphorical othering of
the urban poor in order to focus attention closer to home. However, he recognized
that on one level he too was no less guilty of holding the more disgusting paupers,
like Jo the crossing-sweeper, at arm's length. Dickens's need to distance himself
from the urban poor is likely to have derived from his own precarious class
position. The late nineteenth-century novelist George Gissing asserted of the man
he adopted as his mentor that:
Dickens, for all his sympathy, could not look with entire approval on the poor
grown articulate about their wrongs. He would not have used the phrase, but
he thought the thought, that humble folk must know "their station". He was a
member of the middle class, and as far from preaching "equality" in its social
sense as any man that ever wrote. Essentially a member of the great middle
class, and on that very account able to do such work, to strike such blows, for
the cause of humanity in his day and generation.40
Notwithstanding the fact that Gissing's statements undoubtedly reveal more about
his own class anxieties, his comments on Dickens's status as a member of the
bourgeoisie are of import. Dickens was renowned for his activities as a
philanthropist, and the establishment of charitable organizations (such as his own
Urania Cottage project, or the campaign that he launched in Household Words for
sanitary reform) may be regarded as marking the arrival of the middle classes to a
position of both social and political ascendancy. Fredric Jameson has astutely
commented that philanthropy is an attempt to enforce 'a nonpolitical and
individualizing solution to the exploitation which is structurally inherent in the
social system'.41 In other words it constitutes an effort on behalf of the middle
classes to relieve the symptoms of poverty rather than the causes, and to satisfy the
immediate needs of the lower orders (in order to prevent them from rising up)
without significantly altering the social structure, thus without challenging the
bourgeois position of hegemony. In advocating remedial measures Dickens was
therefore simultaneously involved in both asserting a middle-class identity for
himself and seeking to prevent the chaotic upheaval that he predicted would ensue
if the needs of the poor continued to be ignored.
As a result of his childhood experiences in Warren's Blacking Factory (in
which he was forced, at the age of twelve, to work for several months while his
father was imprisoned for debt), Dickens's own attitude towards the urban poor is
both complex and contradictory. On the one hand, he manifests great sympathy
and compassion toward the underclass, while on the other he seems to be afraid of
returning to their ranks. Dickens's need to engage in this process of othering in
order to reassert his class position is neatly exemplified by his recollection of his
blacking factory days when he observes of his relations with his co-workers, 'No
words could express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship'.4 In this revealing moment of candour Dickens registers his
belief that his time at Warren's signalled a descent for him and that he was unable
to prevent himself from feeling painfully, yet contemptuously aloof from his young
colleagues. Such a stance clearly conflicts with his well-known philosophy of
benevolent paternalism, and his guilt at these thoughts may only be imaginatively
(and possibly also subconsciously) reconciled through a process of displacement.
John Bayley has interestingly remarked one facet of the displacement process in
Dickens's transformation of the young Bob Fagin, (who had shown him kindness
at Warren's) into the pickpocket and fence of Oliver Twist:
No wonder Fagin the criminal is such an ambivalent figure when the real
Fagin's kindness had, so to speak, threatened to inure Dickens to the hopeless
routine of the wage-slave. So passionate was the young Dickens's desire for
the station in life to which he felt entitled and so terrifying his sense that it was
being denied him, that he must have hated the real Fagin for the virtue which
he could not bear to accept or recognise in the nightmare world, because it
might help to subdue him into it. The real Fagin's kindness becomes the
criminal Fagin's villainy.43
Bayley's example is an extreme one, but nevertheless, Dickens engages himself in
a similar process of displacement when he reconfigures the urban poor as the
colonized. In so doing he is able, to a degree, to reconcile his need for distance
from the class into which he had so nearly been subsumed. Moreover, at the same
time he can express a genuine compassion and generate an awareness of the need
for social reform.
The novelist's compulsive night wanderings through the back streets of
London and Paris may be interpreted as further evidence of his need to
demonstrate to himself that he was essentially a member of the middle class.
Dickens described himself as 'dragged by invisible forces'44 to roam the city and
observe, and the excursions of the Uncommercial Traveller may be seen as the
anthropological ramblings of Mr Pickwick taken to an extreme. The intrepid tone
of journalistic pieces like 'On duty with Inspector Field', or 'The Detective Police'
attest to Dickens's sense that he is entering another world when following the
Inspector on his rounds. The distancing process is achieved superbly in the latter
article through a juxtaposition of the sordid London underworld with a series of
exotic artefacts exhibited in the British Museum. The piece shifts in the space of a
paragraph from a description of the 'Parrot Gods of the South Sea Islands, and
from the birds and beetles of the tropics, and from the Arts of Greece and Rome,
and from the Sculptures of Nineveh, and from the traces of an elder world, when
these were not' [UT & RP 514] to ask 'How many, who amidst this compound of
sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses, with all their vile
contents, animate and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would
believe that they breathe this air?' [UT & RP 514]. Thus the overwhelming
difference between the two worlds is conveyed through contrasting the British
Museum—on one level a depository for colonial artefacts and signifier of imperial
supremacy—with the undiscovered inhabitants of the nearer East—humiliating
specimens of a laissez-faire society—with their 'sallow cheeks... brutal eyes...matted
hair...infected, vermin-haunted heaps of rags' [UT & RP 514-5]. We are therefore
left in no doubt that we are entering uncharted territory, as foreign to the
contemporary reader as any outpost of Mrs Jellyby's Borrioboola-Gha.
The device of the expedition—which had become rather a cliche by the
1870s—is however, taken to the point of absurdity by the engraver Gustave Dor6
and the journalist Blanchard Jerrold (following in the footsteps of Dickens) when
Jerrold describes the elaborate preparations he and his partner undertook for their
journey into the East End:
You put yourself in communication to begin with. You adopt rough clothes.
You select two or three companions who will not flinch before the humours
and horrors of Tiger Bay: and you commit yourself to the guidance of one of
the intelligent and fearless heads of the detective force. He mounts the box of
the cab about eight o'clock: and the horse's head is turned—east.45
Jerrold's account of the preparations is evocative of Edward Said's descriptions in

Orientalism of T.E. Lawrence disguising himself as an Arab. Just as Said
challenges the extent to which Arabs were duped by the blond-haired, blue-eyed
impostor, one cannot help wondering how convincing Jerrold's disguise actually
was to the inhabitants of the East End. For Jerrold, the journey into the nether
world sheds the 'pilgrimage' characteristics boasted by the title of his work and
instead seems to degenerate into a child's game of dressing-up. Although Dickens
sensationalized his wanderings by adopting the tone of an adventure story, thus
drawing attention to the otherness of the world under exploration, in articles like
'Night Walks' from The Uncommercial Traveller, the tone of intrepid discovery
conveys a sense of unreality. A tone of this kind undermines any outraged
responses that the revelations of the piece could otherwise have elicited. Hence,
the stories of the 'savage' children of Covent Garden Market, 'who sleep in the
baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any object they think they can lay their thieving
hands on' [UT & RP 133-4] become lost in the hyperbole of the travelogue and
take on a quite different effect.
One characteristic shared by both Dickens and Jerrold as explorers of the
impoverished other world is the proprietorial nature of their gaze. Dickens in
particular seems have been impelled to take to the streets out of a morbid
fascination with the other world he came so close to inhabiting. The very act of
wandering as an observer with no particular aim placed him firmly within a
leisured middle class. In this respect his perambulations may be viewed as an act
of confirmation. So long as Dickens was able to leave the bourgeois sanctuary of
his comfortable homes Tavistock House or Gad's Hill Place to draw inspiration
from the East End, he could remain confident that he was not in danger of
returning to the world of the Marshalsea Prison and the blacking factory. His sense
of national identity was thus tangled inextricably with a number of class concerns
that compelled him to constantly reiterate the order of his world. Although
unquestionably earnest in his philanthropic endeavours, these works are certainly
linked to his need to assert his status in the super-family. His vision of an equal
world is grounded in a Lockean meritocracy whereby all may at least begin their
lives with equal advantages, but where status is achieved through assertion of one's
abilities. The image of the paralyzed Sir Leicester at the end of Bleak House
testifies to Dickens's conviction that the smug and inert aristocracy had
relinquished their claim to power through what he saw as their idleness and
negligence. The country was now in the hands of the up and coming middle
classes, and that was, according to Dickens's doctrine, the way forward, if they
could only be persuaded to abandon an equally negligent laissez-faire that left him
feeling as if the entire world was in the wrong.
Dickens's own belief in what was later termed the 'natural selection' that led
to the demise of Sir Leicester and his class is neatly summed-up in a remark he
made about his own middle-class vigour in a letter to his good friend John Forster
in 1841. Dickens mused to himself, 'Now, I wonder if I should make a good
settler! I wonder, if I went to a new colony with my head, hands, legs, and health,
I should force myself to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream!
What do you think? Upon my word I believe I should'.46 At odds with this
anticipation of social Darwinism are both his benevolence and his sense of duty
and responsibility. It is these tensions that led to his othering of the urban poor in
spite of his protestations of a common humanity. The contradictions in the works
of the 1850s, led to an ever more despondent view of the world and Britain's role
within it, along with an increasingly complicated attitude towards all forms of
otherness. The identity of the nation was in jeopardy, and according to Dickens, it
was endangered by its own overseas ambitions and interference.
Notes
1 Raphael Samuel. Quoted in Patrick Brantlinger. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit
in Britain, 1694-1994. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 13.
2 Peter Scott. Quoted in Linda Colley. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
3 Anthony D. Smith. National Identity. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1991. 11.
4 See, for example John Plunkett. Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
5 Charles Dickens. The Pickwick Papers. Ed. Robert L. Patten. 1976. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin, 1986. 19. Patten's figures include sales in English-speaking
countries, 'from America to Van Diemen's Land'. However, sales figures alone may
not be relied upon to establish the breadth of a novel's circulation since they cannot
take into account the illiterate, largely working-class, people who heard the instalments
read aloud. As Himmelfarb has stated: 'The memoirs of the time are fall of...reports
of the poorest people reading Dickens, and those who could not read listening to the
latest instalments read aloud in the servants' hall, lodging house, public house, or tea
shop'. Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Industrial Age.
London: Faber & Faber, 1984. 455.
6 Robert L. Patten. Charles Dickens and his Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
7 Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Idea of Poverty. 312.
8 Chris Brooks & Peter Faulkner, (ed.) The White Man's Burdens. Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1996. 18.
9 Brantlinger, Fictions of State. 1.
10 Malcolm Andrews. Dickens and the English. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979.173.
11 For a more in-depth discussion of the discourses surrounding gothic polity and the
denial of the conquest see Chris Brooks. The Gothic Revival. London: Phaidon Press
Ltd, 1999.
12 Benjamin Disraeli. Sybil, or the Two Nations. 1845 Sheila M. Smith (ed). Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981. 124.
13 Christopher Hibbert. The Making of Charles Dickens. 1967. London: Book Club
Associates. 1968. 268.
14 Simon Gikandi. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 26.
15 Smith. National Identity. 11.
16 Henry Cole. Quoted in The Official Descriptive & Illustrated Catalogue of the Great
Exhibition (1851). Three Volumes. London: Spicer Brothers. Clowes & Sons, 1851.
1. My italics.
17 Thomas Richards. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and

Spectacle 1851-1914. California: Stanford University Press, 1990. 35.
18 GuyDebord. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983. Paragraph 24.
19 [Charles Dickens] 'Last Words of the Old Year'. Household Words. Volume 1,
number 41. 4 January, 1851. 338.
20 Thomas Carlyle. Past & Present. 1843. Richard D. Altick (ed.). New York: New
York University Press, 1965.
21 [Harper] 'The Claims of Labour*. Household Words. Volume 3, number 67. July 5
1851. 356.
22 [Harper]'The Claims of Labour'. 356
23 Henry Cole. Catalogue. 2.
24 Benjamin Disraeli. Quoted in Asa Briggs. Victorian People: A Reassessment of
Persons and Themes. London: Odhams, 1954. 43.
25 To W.H. Wills, 27 July, 1851. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 6. 448.
26 To The Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 11 July, 1851. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume 6. 428.
27 Catalogue, volume 2. 281.
28 To The Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 11 July, 1851. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume 6. 428-9.
29 Punch. Volume 20-21, 1851. 13.
30 Charles Dickens. Bleak House. Ed. Norman Page. Introduction by J. Hillis Miller.
1971. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985. 12.
31 Ernest Gellner. Quoted in Anne McClintock. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and
Sexuality in the Colonial Context. London: Routledge, 1995. 353.
32 Edgar Johnson. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 20.
33 Watts Phillips. The Wild Tribes of London. London: Ward & Lock, 1855. 10.
34 Punch. 24 October, 1868. 178.
35 Tim Dolin. 'Race and the Social Plot in The Mystery of Edwin Drood* in Shearer West
(ed.) The Victorians and Race. Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1997. 88.
36 Disraeli. Sybil. 65-6.
37 Barnaby Rudge offers a particularly useful example of Dickens's method of
displacement, as not only does he reduce the no-Popery rioters to the status of savages,
he also offloads his anxieties about the Chartist activity of the 1840s onto a depiction
of the mob-violence of the Gordon Riots of 1780.
38 In Brantlinger. Rule of Darkness. 178.
39 For a discussion of Esther's role as colonizer see Chris Brooks. Signs for the Times:
Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984.
53-70.
40 George Gissing. Charles Dickens. 1898. London: Blackie & Son Ltd, 1929. 206.
41 Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
London: Methuen, 1981. 249.
42 Hibbert56.
43 Hibbert78.
44 Quoted in Hibbert 19.
45 Gustave Dore* and Blanchard Jerrold. London: A Pilgrimage. 1872. New York:
Dover, 1970. 141-2.
46 To John Forster, [?mid-August 1841] The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 2. 358.
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Chapter 3
The Racial Other

'Mr Dickens has just been to take leave of me.. .He is resolved to go into the slave
districts, determined to ascertain by personal inspection the condition of the poor
slave. He should not divulge this on the other side of the Atlantic: his life might
be endangered'.1
'The effect produced upon English people by the sight of slavery in every
direction is very new, and not very agreeable, and it is not the less painfully felt
from hearing upon every breeze the mocking words, "All men are bom free and
equal'".2
Slavery and Abolition
The working classes were not the only 'other nation' to play an important role in
both Dickens's imagination and his politics. Matters of race loomed large at the
very beginning of his career when he was a parliamentary reporter, listening to the
debates surrounding the passage of the Colonial Secretary, Edward Stanley's
Abolition Bill in the early 1830s.3 The slave trade in the British colonies had been
outlawed in 1807, although the institution of slavery itself did not end until 1833.
By 1840 the British had taken up the cause of universal abolition and London
hosted the first International Anti-Slavery Convention. Linda Colley has drawn
attention to the seemingly rapid change in attitude:
From being the world's greediest and most successful traders of slaves in the
eighteenth century, the British had shifted to being able to preen themselves
on being the world's foremost opponents of slavery. This had been an
extraordinary revolution in sensibility and ideas, one that revealed as much if
not more about how the British thought about themselves, as it did about how
they saw black people on the other side of the world.
The issue of emancipation was a cause championed repeatedly by the young
Dickens throughout the 1840s, particularly after his first visit to America between
January and June 1842. An initial glance at some of the work he produced during
the 1850s and 1860s would suggest a sudden volte-face from ardent support for the
abolitionists to a violent and irrational racism. Admittedly Dickens's views on
race did become more extreme after 1850. However, for a Victorian, support for
the emancipation of North American slaves was by no means incompatible with
strong opinions on the inferiority of non-white peoples.
The complexity of Dickens's attitude toward race, like that of many of his
contemporaries, can perhaps be best understood by looking back to eighteenth-
century attempts to classify all living matter. In 1758 Linnaeus categorized men
according to their skin colour in Systerna Naturae, while in 1782 the politician
Soame Jenyns created a hierarchy of all living matter in his 'Disquisition on the
Chain of Universal Being'.4 Jenyns formulated his ordering of mankind according
to Enlightenment notions of civilization and argued that:
[T]his animal life rises from this low beginning in the shell-fish, through
innumerable species of insects, fishes, birds, and beasts to the confines of
reason, where, in the dog, the monkey, and chimpanze [sic], it unites so
closely with the lowest degree of that quality in man, that they cannot be
easily distinguished from each other. From this lowest degree in the brutal
Hottentot, reason, with the assistance of learning and science, advances,
through the various stages of human understanding, which rise above each
other, till in a Bacon or a Newton it attains the summit.5
Peter Fryer has noted that the works of Linnaeus, Jenyns and Blumenbach were
familiar to many Victorians.6 Indeed, the final paragraph of Dickens's 1853
article, 'The Noble Savage' in which he urges, 'We have no greater justification
for being cruel to the miserable object [i.e. the savage], than for being cruel to a
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or an ISAAC NEWTON' [RP 473] would suggest an
awareness at least of the argument of Jenyns's 'Disquisitions'.7 Interestingly, the
next 'Disquisition' in the series is a piece urging kindness to inferior animals—
exactly the type of sentiment to motivate figures like Dickens and Martineau to
involve themselves in abolitionist causes. Preposterous as some of Jenyns's ideas
may seem today, they represent a genuine impulse to make sense of and order the
world, taking account of environmental factors, instead of assuming an innate
African inferiority. Dickens's stance on racial matters may have been complicated
further by his early interest in the evolutionary debate. He reviewed Robert Hunt's
The Poetry of Science for The Examiner in December 1848 and was also in
possession of an 1845 edition of Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation. Later acquisitions were to include Buffon's Natural History, containing
a Theory of the Earth, General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, Vegetables,
Minerals in sixteen volumes; an 1860 edition of Darwin's Origin of Species; Sir
Charles LyelPs Geographical Evidence of the Antiquity of Man and Hugh Miller's
Testimony of the Rocks. As Dickens's collection held a number of presentation
copies (such as J.L. Milton's Stream of Life on our Globe) it is certainly not safe to
assume that just because he owned the books he had read them. However, the
sheer number of volumes on the subject would appear to indicate an interest.
Racial classification aside, Dickens's earliest literary participation in the
emancipation debate took the radical form of a series of attacks on Exeter Hall—
the headquarters of the British anti-slavery campaign—and its blindness to
domestic concerns. The narrator of The Pickwick Papers describes the town of
Muggleton as:
An ancient and loyal borough, mingling a zealous advocacy of Christian
principles with a devoted attachment to commercial rights; in demonstration
whereof, the mayor, corporation, and other inhabitants have presented at
divers times, no fewer than one thousand four hundred and twenty petitions
against the continuance of negro slavery abroad, and an equal number against
The Racial Other 45
any interference with the factory system at home; sixty-eight in favour of the
sale of livings in the Church, and eighty-six for abolishing Sunday trading in
the street. [PP 87-8]
As in his satirical depiction of Mrs Jellyby's Borrioboola-Gha venture almost
twenty years later in Bleak House, Dickens registers his anxiety at the myopia of
those who directed their efforts abroad. He is incensed by the neglect of the poor
of Britain whose privations are, for Dickens, more pressing than those of the "men
and brothers' in America or on the banks of the Niger. Dickens's position on
slavery was, throughout his career, inextricably linked to his concerns regarding
the underclass, to the extent that he often appropriated abolitionist rhetoric to
discuss problems at home. Even in Sketches by Boz, his 'Parlour Orator', Mr
Rogers parodically points to the paradox of the emancipation of black slaves in the
colonies when white slavery was still rife in the mother country:
'You are a slave,' said the red-faced man, "and the most pitiable of all slaves".
"Werry hard if I am," interrupted the greengrocer, "for I got no good out of the
twenty million that was paid for 'mancipation, anyhow".
"A willing slave," ejaculated the red-faced man, getting more red with
eloquence and contradiction—"resigning the dearest birthright of your
children—neglecting the sacred call of Liberty—who, standing imploringly
before you, appeals to the warmest feelings of your heart, and points to your
helpless infants, but in vain" [SBB 238]
By placing his critique in the mouth of the red-faced blusterer, Dickens shows that,
at this stage of his career, he is still able to view the misguided philanthropists of
Exeter Hall with amusement. The greengrocer's comments register the muddled
priorities of directing twenty million pounds towards compensating plantation
owners following the abolition of slavery, when that money could have been spent
on poor relief to alleviate the effects of the draconian 1834 Poor Law Amendment
Act.8 However, by the 1850s Dickens's equation of the abolitionist cause with
humbug manifested itself in more odious characters like Bleak House's Mrs
Pardiggle and the Reverend Chadband, although Wilkie Collins's hypocritical
Godfrey Ablewhite in The Moonstone (1868) offers an even more extreme
lampoon of the type.
In spite of his support for the emancipation of all slaves, Dickens was not
alone in his call for Britain's leaders to re-assess their priorities and deal with
domestic issues before looking further afield. In his introduction to the polemical
'Nigger Question' (1853), Thomas Carlyle, another believer in a world whose
'natural' order could not be overturned, asserted:
In regard to West-Indian affairs...Lord John Russell is able to comfort us with
one fact, indisputable where so many are dubious. That the Negroes are all
very happy and doing well. A fact very comfortable indeed. West-Indian
Whites, it is admitted, are far enough from happy; West-Indian Colonies not
unlike sinking wholly into ruin: at home too, the British Whites are rather
badly off; several millions of them hanging on the verge of continual famine;
and in single towns, many thousands of them very sore put to it, at this time,
not to live "well" or as a man should, in any sense temporal or spiritual, but to
live at all:—these again are uncomfortable facts; and they are extremely
extensive and important ones.9
Although Carlyle is less temperate than Dickens, the two writers clearly share the
same sense of outrage and incredulity that the government could neglect those
subjects closest to home, or in Carlyle's case, white men in the former slave
colonies. In spite of their indignation at the apparent abandonment of the British
working and pauper classes, the movement to abolish slavery had a massive cross-
class appeal. Shearer West has commented on the role played by the rise of cheap
newspapers in the perpetuation of racial ideologies.10 Yet, mass circulation—
along with the speeches of travelling abolitionists who roamed from town to town
in order to spread the word—also contributed significantly to the raising of popular
support for universal emancipation. In a stirring effort to rally support for his
crusade against American slavery, the solicitor and abolitionist Sir George Stephen
wrote in The Northampton Mercury:
God gave the victory [against slavery in the British colonies] neither to the
strong nor to the great, but to the agency of unknown and obscure fellow-
labourers with them, who stirred up the people to enthusiasm...it is true that it
was 'the million' by whom the battle was fought, and, under God's blessing,
by whom the day was won. So determined, so active, and so powerful were
"the people', that on one occasion, at only ten days' notice, they sent a body of
sixty-six members of the Lower House to the platform at Exeter Hall, there to
receive with submission the directions of their constituents as to their votes.11
The majority of 'the million' were, it should be remembered, disenfranchized at
this time (the 1832 Reform Act having failed to address the issue of working-class
suffrage), and Stephen's references to the 'unknown and obscure fellow-labourers'
en masse and in scare quotes underscores his social distance from them. The
'people' in this context, however, do not pose any form of threat as their activities
are being channelled towards a cause of which Stephen approved.
Slavery had, therefore, become a cause that could both engage the populace
and distract them from agitation against their own servitude. It hardly seems a
coincidence that the most vigorous abolitionist activity took place in the 1830s and
the 'hungry forties'. Indeed, Linda Colley has suggested that the anti-slavery
cause served to 'distract people's attention from domestic affairs and encourage
them to contrast their own position favourably with that of less fortunate peoples
abroad'.12 Certainly, many working-class abolitionists were moved to draw
parallels between their own metaphorical condition of slavery (for example to
factory owners) and that of the Southern captives. It has been asserted, though,
that the issue gave groups without a voice in the political arena—such as women
and the working classes—the chance to make their feelings known and petition for
a concern about which they felt strongly, incidentally giving both groups a safe
forum within which to test their political strength. Of course, the social position of
both workers and women was positively emancipated compared to the abuses
suffered by the slave. Moreover, it would appear that the abolitionist debate
occupied the space in the popular consciousness that came to be held by a
The Racial Other 47
jingoistic fascination with territorial acquisitions in the years following 1870.

Once emancipation had been achieved throughout their Empire, the British were
able to feel superior to their transatlantic cousins for having acted on their
humanitarian impulses. The American slaveholders became a common enemy,
who inspired a hatred that was to unite all classes, and according to Colley, the
American slave owners actually displaced the hated French as a focus for national
enmity, many conveniently forgetting that America had, until 1776, itself been a
colony of the British.13 Punch certainly dwelled on a set of alternative stripes for
the American flag by reminding its readers of the lashings inflicted upon the slave
by the grasping plantation owner. From its inception Punch pursued a long-
running offensive against the slave owners with illustrations such as 'The Shadow
of English Liberty in America', and 'The Land of Liberty' [See Figure 3.1].
The journal also contained a plethora of articles spanning the 1840s to the
1860s, which attacked the inhumanity of the system. America's participation in
the Great Exhibition elicited a number of condemnatory pieces, including
'America in Crystal' in which several shackled slaves are put forward as samples
of American wares.14 'Yankee Doodle in 1851' offers another effective satire in
which American Independence is equated directly with slavery, and it is suggested
that with the Americans will come a whole host of disruptive influences in the
form of Chartists and Socialists.15 America, it would seem, had come to represent
all that threatened the status quo in Britain. For many, though, the emancipation
campaign offered an opportunity to sneer at American pretensions to liberty and
equality. In American Notes Dickens wrote ironically of the clear contradictions in
the American constitution which on the one hand enshrined 'the Inalienable Rights
of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness', and what he represented as the
'trial' of former President John Quincy Adams for speaking out against slavery:
It was but a week, since an aged, grey-haired man, a lasting honour to the land
that gave him birth, who has done good service to his country, as his
forefathers did, and who will be remembered scores upon scores of years after
the worms bred in its corruption, are but so many grains of dust—it was but a
week, since this old man had stood for days upon his trial before this very
body, charged with having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic, which has
for its accursed merchandise men, and women, and their unborn children. [AN
119]
T.A. Jackson has pointed out that for all his emotion, Dickens has failed to
understand what he has seen here, pointing out that Adams was campaigning for
the right to present petitions against slavery, which the House had refused to accept
since 1836. 6 In (perhaps wilfully) misreading the situation, Dickens emphasizes
the slippage between rhetoric and reality and his disdain for the slave system is
unequivocally expressed. Frances Trollope, on the other hand, adopted a more
reactionary stance with her observation:
I am very far from intending to advocate the system of slavery; I conceive it to
be essentially wrong; but so far as my observation has extended, I think its
influence is far less injurious to the manners and morals of the people than the
THE L A N D OF L I B E R T Y .
3.1 'The Land of Liberty'. Punch. Volume 13,1847. 215.

Reproduced with permission tit Punch Ltd.
The Racial Other 49
fallacious ideas of equality, which are so fondly cherished by the working

classes of the white population in America.17
Mrs Trollope's anxieties respecting the breakdown of the class structure point to a
fear of a similar levelling process occurring in Britain. She goes on to speak
candidly of her feelings of discomfort in the Northern free states where the labour
is hired, and argues that she, 'never failed to mark the difference on entering a
slave state. I was immediately comfortable, and at my ease, and felt that the
intercourse between me and those who served me, was profitable to both parties'.18
For Mrs Trollope it would appear that only rigidly demarcated social boundaries
could be acceptable in the free republic. Furthermore, her fear of democracy and
support for the principle of slavery, if not for its barbaric practice, has more in
common with the condemnatory Punch article than would appear on the surface.
It is the energetic abolitionist, exponent of political economy and future
Household Words author, Harriet Martineau who best exemplifies the relationship
between domestic issues and emancipation. According to Gertrude Himmelfarb,
her interest in political economy marked 'the movement from abolition to reform',
yet the divisions between the two issues are much less clearly defined than the two
categories would suggest.19 Between 1832 and 1834 Martineau penned her
Illustrations of Political Economy, a set of stories seeking to instruct the workforce
in the utilitarian theories of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Martineau was
a staunch advocate of the unpopular new Poor Law, and her didactic volumes
constituted an attempt to promote self-help and to discourage dependence on the
(now extremely limited) welfare offered by local parishes. The publication of
these works, along with her Poor Laws and Paupers certainly did coincide with the
ending of British slavery. However, 1833 did not herald the end of the debate for
either Martineau or the public at large, and both parties continued to direct their
efforts to the enslaved on the other side of the Atlantic. Abolition became the
legitimate cause into which all classes were encouraged to plough their energies.
As is demonstrated by the Punch articles, anyone with an interest in reform closer
to home could be dismissed as 'Not English' and thus equated with the despised
slave-holders as somehow wishing to undermine British freedom.
The numerous 'replies' elicited by the controversial American Notes
emphasize the connections between the lives of the slaves and those of the British
underclass. Significantly, the approach of all of the pamphlets is not to defend the
slave system, but rather to undermine the judgmental stance taken by Britain in her
attempts to moralize for the rest of the world. Although several of the pieces
attack Dickens's wry observations on the differences between English and
American society, when they arrive at the question of slavery their arguments
become less personal as they hit out at Britain's failure to deal with her own social
problems. British writers were, of course, far from oblivious to such analogies. In
Society in America—which Dickens, incidentally, considered 'the best book
written on the U.S.'—Harriet Martineau registered a curious combination of
admiration for the patience of the slave owners and disdain for a system that
enabled one man to own another.20 Five years before Dickens's voyage to the
United States, Martineau observed that whenever the emancipation issue arose, the
Americans retaliated by referring to the Irish question:
One remarkable indication of such blindness was the almost universal mention
of the state of the Irish to me, as a worse case than American slavery. I never
attempted, of course, to vindicate the state of Ireland: but I was surprised to
find no one able, till put in the way, to see the distinction between political
misgovernment and personal slavery: between exasperating a people by
political insult, and possessing them like brutes, for pecuniary profit.21
While Martineau suggests that such comparisons result from 'blindness', the
authors of several of the reactions to American Notes saw the parallel as an
extremely valid one. Dickens himself suggested that it would be wrong to
'declaim against the ignorant peasantry of Ireland, and mince the matter when
these American taskmasters are in question' [AN 242], although he never engaged
in the Irish debate in any real depth. Notwithstanding this fact, he had certainly
pointed to the appalling living conditions of Irish migrants to London in Sketches
by Boz:
The man in the shop, perhaps, is in the baked 'jemmy' line, or the fire-wood
and hearth-stone line, or any other line which requires a floating capital of
eighteen-pence or thereabouts: and he and his family live in the shop, and the
small back parlour behind it. Then there is an Irish labourer and HIS family in
the back kitchen, and a jobbing man-carpet-beater and so forth—with HIS
family in the front one. [SBB 72]
We later learn that the Irish labourer, like the Englishmen around him, has resorted
to drinking and violence and presents a direct contrast to the diligent Irish men and
women depicted in the later American Notes. The issue here is surely
environmental, since there is little, other than his nationality, to distinguish him
from the English carpet-beater who 'extends his professional pursuits to his wife'
or the man in the shop who 'ill treats' his spouse [SBB 73]. Rather than resorting
to stock Irish stereotypes, Dickens demonstrates that the over-crowded squalor of
Seven Dials would drive anyone to drunkenness and violence, including the Irish
who have left their homeland to seek a better life.
The hardships in Britain's closest and most troublesome colony were of far
greater concern for the American respondent writing under the unlikely name
'Quarles Quickens', whose distance from the repression in Ireland enabled him to
form a clearer impression of its similarities to slavery. Quickens, whose pamphlet
is not so much a defence of America as an assault on British shortcomings, penned
what is probably the best-known reply. The piece, in places though, seems more
like an endorsement of Dickens's opinions than a critique, and this is nowhere
more apparent than in his discussion of the Condition of England Question:
But I repeat the question again, is Great Britain honest and sincere in her
endeavours to annihilate the Slave Trade and Slavery? The answer rushes to
my tongue, and would find utterance in a thunder-tone. No, no! this pretence
is a more cursed hypocrisy than ever disgraced the policy of any nation that
ever existed. It bears the lie on its own face, in lines the most horrible and
disgusting. Could any man, who heard as I did, in the British Parliament, the
The Racial Other 51
recital of what atrocities were practiced upon men, and women, and tender
children, in the coal mines; how men were obliged to labor, up to their knees
in the mine, in a state of entire nakedness, day after day and week after week,
in shafts where it was impossible to erect the form...I say, could any rational
man listen to those recitals, and yet be willing to believe in the sincerity of
British efforts for the extinction of slavery.22
Far from constituting an attack, this account would not be out of place within the
covers of Bleak House. However, the fact that these observations were addressed
to Dickens demonstrates the extent to which the author of Oliver Twist had become
a spokesman for the British nation as a whole, but more especially, for its poor.
Slavery aside, one of the features of American society most admired by Dickens
was its provision for (white) social well being which he witnessed at first hand in
his visits to hospitals, schools and other institutions. He wrote to Forster that the
American state was, 'a parent to its people; has a parental care and watch over all
poor children, women labouring of child, sick persons, and captives', and he hoped
to see the displacement of the laissez-faire system at home in favour of this more
benevolent welfare scheme.23
The state of the British workforce was not the only problem cited to
undermine British calls for abolition. Quickens did not simply focus on the plight
of the working classes and the famished Irish, but looked further afield to India and
the rack-renting system. In this concern he was far from alone; the anonymous
author of Change for the American Notes, another response, draws a clever parallel
between the seizure of a nation from the North American Indians and the British
colonization of India:
Mr Dickens states the interest he felt in viewing, at Harrisburg, the treaties
between the Indians and the Whites...indeed, the contemplation of the ever-
progressive change in the being and numbers of the red men is most painful;
but when of late the North American Indians have agreed to the cession of
territories on terms stated, they have fully understood the nature of the
compact...Had I been of the bolder sex, I might have asked them at the India
House to gratify me with a sight of the treaties of cession...between English
officers and Hindoo rulers. Really those who live in such a very glass island,
should not throw stones at the people of other countries. I am convinced the
Hindoos are happier under the British rule than under that of their fierce,
treacherous, and cowardly native princes; but the mildness or equity of the
sway is no justification of the means of its attainment—the means are easily
defined—a judicious mixture offeree and fraud.24
There is no evidence to suggest that Dickens held any opinion on the condition of
the Indian peasant in the 1840s, so to levy a charge of hypocrisy at him would be
unreasonable. His closest engagement with the subcontinent at this time was
through his depiction of the enigmatic 'native' in Dombey and Son (1846-1848),
although in 1849 he was already making arrangements with Miss Courts to
nominate his eight-year-old son Walter for an East India Company cadetship.25
However, at this stage of his career the Empire was still little more than a useful
backdrop—if Dickens thought about India at all it was only in connection with its
trading concerns. It was not really until the popular Indian display at the 18S1
Great Exhibition, and the various annexations preceding the Crimean War that
public interest in the subcontinent was aroused. Indeed, by the mid-1850s
Household Words had taken up the Indian cause in earnest, carrying a number of
articles on both Indian customs and abuses by the East India Company. Capper
and Sidney's 'India Pickle' and Capper's 'The Mofussil' both dwelt on the
maladministration of the East India Company, while Punch concerned itself with
the problems resulting from the expansion of Indian frontiers.26 Although his
primary concern lay always with domestic issues, Dickens was certainly, in the
years preceding the Indian Mutiny, eager to censure slavery and cruelty wherever
he perceived it.
As a result, perhaps, of what was still an overriding concern with British social
reform, Dickens's initial engagement with abolition was somewhat muted when
compared to that of figures like Harriet Beecher Stowe, although as an American,
the issue would arguably have been more pressing to Mrs Stowe. However,
Dickens's interest in the cause became more pronounced after his visit to America
in 1842 when he saw some of the effects of the system at first hand. Dickens was
aware of the threats that had been made against the outspoken Harriet Martineau
during her tour of America, and it is probable that her treatment influenced his
decision not to speak out against the institution for the duration of his stay.
Instead, Dickens restricted his public statements to attacks on literary pirates,
reprinting his works in America without his consent and without any royalty
payments to their author. International copyright may have been a controversial
debate, but it was certainly not one that would provoke death threats!27 In his
private capacity, though, he complained:
They won't let you be silent. They will ask you what you think of it; and will
expatiate on slavery as if it were one of the greatest blessings of mankind.
"It's not", said a hard, bad-looking fellow to me the other day, "it's not the
interest of a man to use his slaves ill. It's damned nonsense that you hear in
England".—I told him quietly that it was not a man's interest to get drunk, or
to steal, or to game, or to indulge in any vice, but he did indulge in it for all
that.28
On his return to England Dickens did devote a considerable part of his American
Notes to a sustained attack on the slave system, and as the many 'responses'
illustrate, it was this aspect of the work which generated the most controversy.
Whilst he remained in the U.S. it was only in his letters that he allowed his guard
to drop to reveal the depth of his disgust. He wrote to his friend the actor W.C.
Macready on board a steamer from Pittsburg to Cincinnati: 'I have not changed—I
cannot change...my secret opinion of this country. I have said to Forster that I
believe the heaviest blow ever dealt at Liberty's Head will be dealt by this nation
in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth'.29 He also prided himself on his
refusal to accept any form of public hospitality in the slave states, as he indicated
to Forster:
When we reach Baltimore, we are in the regions of slavery. It exists there, in
its least shocking and most mitigated form; but there it is. They whisper, here
The Racial Other 53
(they only dare whisper, you know, and that below their breaths), that in that
place, and all through the South, there is a dull gloomy cloud on which the
very word seems written. I shall be able to say, one of these days, that I
accepted no public marks of respect in a place where slavery was;—and that's
something.30
A sense of gloomy oppression does indeed pervade the sections of American Notes
that deal with slavery and the feelings of discomfort engendered by its presence.
Although as he registers here, he never actually witnessed the worst evils of the
institution. John Bowen has described Dickens's afterword on slavery as
'surpassingly strange and powerful9, suggesting that its textual positioning outside
of the main body of the journey to, from, and around America in American Notes is
significant, as is his decision to cite Theodore Weld's 1839 pamphlet American
Slavery as it is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, rather than dwelling upon his
own experiences or resorting to his imagination. Commenting on Dickens's
extraordinary, quasi-plagiaristic addendum, Bowen has noted: 'It is a very
uncharacteristic piece of writing, as he is an author who could hardly set his pen on
paper without inflecting every paragraph, every sentence almost, with the mark of
his characteristic rhetorics styles and voice'.31 Dickens piles up example after
example of the cruelty of slave owners, allowing the slaves' damaged bodies to
speak for themselves and resisting the impulse to embellish the accounts with his
own commentary. His voice finally cuts in to denounce those who 'cut pleasant
posies in the shrinking flesh, learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human
face, rack their poetic fancies for liveries of mutilation which their slaves shall
wear for life [AN 242-243]. However, by this point the sheer accumulation of
damaged bodies has driven home his concerns at the discrepancy between the
stories told by slave owners of the paternal relationship between masters and slaves
and the conflicting versions of events to be read on the body of the escapee.
In the main account of his travels, Dickens noted a moral contamination
emanating from the institution of slavery, along with the visible and
unembarrassed maltreatment of slave labourers. En route from Fredericksburgh to
Richmond, the evils of the system even appear to manifest themselves in the
dilapidated state of the Southern buildings, and the whole area seems to be
disintegrating in response to the atrocities that have been enacted to till the land:
The tract of country through which it [the railway] takes its course was once
productive; but the soil has been exhausted by the system of employing a great
amount of slave labour in forcing crops, without strengthening the land: and it
is now little better than a sandy desert overgrown with trees. Dreary and
uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which
one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater
pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most
thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me. [AN
133]
The blighted Southern land here becomes a metaphorical representation of what
Dickens believed slavery was doing to the souls of its upholders. He takes a frank
and obvious pleasure in its barrenness and clearly believes that the lack of fertility
is an appropriate punishment for the outrages against humanity committed on the

site. A rather dismissive Harriet Martineau asserted that:
There is no reason to apprehend serious insurrection; for the negroes are too
degraded to act in concert, or to stand firm before the terrible face of the white
man. Like all deeply-injured classes of persons, they are desperate and cruel,
on occasion, kindly as their nature is; but as a class, they have no courage.
The voice of a white, even of a lady, if it were authoritative, would make a
whole regiment of rebellious slaves throw down their arms and flee.32
Dickens, however, was more perturbed in his assessment of the generations of
discontent that had been fomenting. His vision of the effects of slavery was an
apocalyptic one, akin to that of his good friend, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
whose abolitionist poetry impugns, 'The old and chartered Lie/The feudal curse,
whose whips and yokes/Insult humanity'33 and warns of:
a poor, blind Samson in this land,
Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast Temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.34
Dickens himself compared the eventual abolition of slavery to the 'Day of
Judgment9 [AN 228] and wrote forcefully against those who, 'when they speak of
Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and to be savage, merciless, and
cruel' [AN 22%]. Both writers rejected the idea of the saintly, passive, dutiful slave
of the type later to be envisaged by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1852 novel,
Uncle Tom's Cabin.35 Dickens is somewhat less naive in his outlook and refers to
the masters as 'freeborn outlaws' [AN 242], while drawing attention to the
inevitable resentment generated by the atrocities of the system.
Dickens's reaction to slavery veered between a revulsion that made him so
uncomfortable on entering a slave state that he wished for an immediate end to the
system, and a more cautious belief that the dismantling process should be a gradual
one. The dilemma caused by these two conflicting viewpoints led him to suggest
the retrogressive solution of returning the land to its original owners, the Native
Americans—the type of Utopian solution that he registered was both utterly fair
and completely unworkable. However, despite his assertion that 'the death-song of
a hundred haughty warriors... will be as music to the shriek of one unhappy slave'
[AN 243], he was aware that with emancipation would come friction. The
suppression of slavery on the American subcontinent was fraught with problems
that the British had not had to face in 1833, since the majority of British slaves
served in colonial holdings rather than mainland Britain. Although Mrs Beecher
Stowe saw the free state of Liberia as a sanctuary for the escapee, on a more
realistic level most emancipated slaves would have no option than to continue
living alongside their oppressors in America once the institution had been formally
dissolved. Sir George Stephen made the important point that emancipation within
the British Empire had not been achieved overnight:
The Racial Other 55
They may have greater difficulties to overcome [than Britain], but patience
will overcome them all. It was the work of half a century to overcome our
own. First the slave trade was to be regulated and concluded with humanity.
Sir William Dolben began this enterprise. Then came nearly twenty years ere
Mr Wilberforce succeeded in abolishing the trade; but he did succeed. Then,
followed a term of four years before Lord Brougham could make the traffic
felonious. Fifteen more of labour and anxiety were exhausted in attempts to
"ameliorate" slavery, as if slavery could possibly be diluted into freedom. Yet
the united and indefatigable labour of Lushington, Stephen, and Macaulay, did
do much, and the English slave ceased to be a brute. Finally, five years of
arduous and determined effort, of which Buxton was the leader, were crowned
with triumph, and emancipation was accomplished, not simply as an act of
humanity and justice, but as a duty to God.36
In this protracted account, Stephen omits to mention the significant role played by
rioting Jamaicans between 1831 and 1833 and claims abolition as a wholly British
victory. The other practicality that Stephen failed to consider was the cost of
emancipation. As the author of 'Change for American Notes' demonstrates, it
appeared to be easier for the British government to foot the bill for abolition than it
was for the still relatively young republic:
Why can't America emancipate her slaves as England did?...Why the British
government, out of its enormous resources, purchased the freedom of the
slaves; and if all America had the same desire, has she the means?
Philanthropic as the English are, especially when the object is afar off, and
even while their wealth is greater than their philanthropy, no one can expect
that they will ever offer to pay for another country a full and fair price for their
bondsmen, that slavery may be no more.37
Dickens, however, was not particularly concerned with the economic viability of
emancipation. He concurred fully with Stephen's argument and even seems to
have been astute enough to realize that the issue would eventually bring about a
civil war. His observation that knives would be drawn 'by Englishmen [i.e. the
English settlers in America] in conflict' [AN 243] with one another, appears, with
the benefit of hindsight to be an uncanny prediction of the events of the 1860s.38
When the American Civil War actually did take place, Dickens's response was
at odds with the sentiments he had expressed throughout the 1840s. His fear of
war in Europe in the 1850s led to a reappraisal of his priorities, as he appreciated
that the United States would be a powerful ally against Russia. He felt that
Thomas Carlyle would contend, 'we have thrown this great and powerful friend
away for the sake of the Blacks' and Dickens concurred in this opinion because of
the paramount importance he attached to British needs.39 In spite of Dickens's
apparent about-turn in the 1850s and 1860s, the sheer number of Household Words
articles relating to abolitionism appearing at this time—for example, 'A Cape
Coast Cargo', 'Good Intentions: A Story of the African Blockade' or Harriet
Martineau's 'Freedom or Slavery?'—reveal that he remained supportive of the
campaign regardless of his misgivings.40 The former two articles considered the
effectiveness of continuing a naval blockade on the west coast of Africa, which
sought to prevent the trafficking of slaves to Cuba and Brazil. Opponents argued
that the endeavour was detrimental to the welfare of the slaves, as they were often
thrown from ships under naval pursuit. Dickens had written to the abolitionist
Lord Denman in December 1850, expressing his "horror" at the slave trade, but
remarking that the blockade would not assist the abolitionists. Abolition was still
an important concern for him, but it was increasingly taking second place to issues
of domestic well-being. Dickens's engagement in the emancipation debate did
become increasingly problematized from the late 1850s onward, as his distinctions
between basic human rights and a growing belief in the inferiority of non-white
races became ever more blurred.
Dickens's attitude towards the slaves themselves was, even at the outset of his
career, complex to say the least. Harriet Martineau may have been able to state of
the slaves 'They are citizens', yet Dickens could not—as with the urban poor—
conceive of them on an equal footing.41 His fundamental inability to envisage the
slave as a man and brother is neatly encapsulated in American Notes when he
describes the garb and manners of the "insane imitation of an English coachman'
[AN 131], endlessly harking back to the driver's skin colour and exaggerating all of
his movements to render them grotesque. Dickens is only able to contain the threat
posed by the idea of the black men wearing white men's clothes by ridiculing it
and although this scene is juxtaposed with another condemnation of slavery,
Dickens obviously has difficulty in coping with the man's otherness. Punch too
poked fun at notions of the free black: 'Out-heroding Herod in their monstrous
attempts of imitating and exceeding the fashions of the whites, the emulative
'Darkies' may be seen on Sundays occupying the whole extent of the Broadway
pavement dressed in fashions carried to the very sublime of the ridiculous'.42 A
similar attitude is expressed by Dickens in his expostulation of 1868 against 'The
mechanical absurdity of giving these people votes, at any rate at present, would
glare out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their
heads'.43 He may have been right to suggest that the enfranchisement of the newly
emancipated slaves was merely an electioneering gambit, which, for him, in view
of their lack of education would have been rather a pointless exercise.
Notwithstanding this fact, Dickens's description of the chuckling, eye-rolling black
man with bumps on his head resorts to every racial stereotype in existence and
constitutes yet another attempt to undermine through nervous humour the threat
that has been posed.
Despite his humanitarian principles, when Dickens was afraid of the slave
moving above his station he sought to return him to his place through drawing
upon what we would consider today to be a racist discourse. Nancy Stepan has
contended that, 'a fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half
of the nineteenth-century is why it was, just as the battle against slavery was being
won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally
freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still
mentally, morally and physically a slave'.44 The shackles of rhetoric were certainly
as difficult, if not more so, to cast aside than the manacles of the slave system
itself. Originally, notions of black inferiority and proximity to the lower animals
The Racial Other 57
were perpetuated as a means of justifying slavery. So successful was this

endeavour that once the master-slave barrier had been removed, anxieties
surrounding the existing racial and social hierarchies remained in place and were
exacerbated. Instead of slowly fading away, the racial prejudice increased as
threatened white people sought to uphold their precarious claim to economic,
social and racial superiority. The criteria of what constituted civilization had
always been judged according to Western standards, so that intelligence could only
be proven by the rare few like the literate former slaves, Phyllis Wheatley (1735-
1784), or Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). Given that it was a finable offence to
teach a slave to read or write, it is hardly a surprise that few were able to
demonstrate intellect in Western terms, either in the antebellum years or in the
period immediately following emancipation.
The Exeter abolitionist William Day certainly appreciated the extent to which
assertions about the innate inferiority of the black had been accepted as received
truths. In 1841 he wrote:
[I]t is well known that American writers seek to palliate their cruel and
contemptuous treatment of the sons and daughters of Africa by asserting that
they are "not men and women in the ordinary sense of the terms", but beings
of a stunted intellect and of a degraded order.45
Day was one of the few abolitionists to appreciate the fact that the African was
only degraded because of the way in which the white man had treated him. He
demonstrates the pervasive myth of black inferiority by citing the author and naval
officer, Captain Marryat's amazement that 'In Philadelphia, the free coloured
people are a very respectable class; and, in my opinion, QUITE AS
INTELLIGENT AS THE MORE HUMBLE OF THE FREE WHITES'.46
Marryat's surprise accentuates his unwitting absorption of the very ideology that
propped up the slave trade. He was far from alone; the staunchly pro-abolitionist
Punch ran a series of articles throughout the 1840s-50s dwelling on what it
regarded as the idiosyncratic traits of black people. Pieces such as 'A Nigger
Professor of Cramanology' simultaneously ridiculed the pseudo-science of
craniology and black aspirations to learning.47 The article presents an obvious
paradox, since the twin 'discoveries', phrenology and craniology enabled slave
owners and—in the latter part of the nineteenth century—colonizers to continue to
justify their assertions of superiority over those who were not white by citing
scientific 'evidence'. Another commonly employed tactic was to ridicule the
pidgin English of the slaves to reinforce their otherness. Pi/wc/r's 'Black
Marseillaise' [10 November, 1855. 186] offers the image of a white woman—the
French actress Rachel—in black face singing a creolized version of the
'Marseillaise'.48 In order to appear authentically black, the singer shrieks her song
of the 'sacred lub ob blessed freedom' like a war cry and appropriates the violent
imagery of the French revolutionary anthem. Although presumably intended as a
harmless and humorous article, the piece reinforces racial stereotypes, not least by
the fact that the performer insists on supporting her black make-up by referring to
herself and her comrades as 'niggars' in every verse. The difference in skin colour
no longer offered sufficient grounds for segregation—the signs of difference now
had to be upheld by real or imagined behavioural quirks, many of which were a

direct result of the slave system itself.
Racial discourse was self-perpetuating, and all the more dangerous for this
fact. The growing evolutionary debate of the 1850s was partially responsible for
the mounting prejudice as the rhetoric of anthropologists was adopted by popular
journals like Punch, which designated the African the form of life closest to the
ape, and fears of atavism arose. In truth, the emancipation of the slave seemed to
pose a threat for which there was no historical paradigm. Dickens's acquaintance
Charles Wentworth Dilke voiced some of these fears with his observation that
"since history fails us as a guide to the future of the emancipated blacks, we should
see what time will bring, and meanwhile set down negroes as a monster class of
which nothing is yet known'.49 The liberated black, whether in Africa or America
had, for Dilke, become a "Dark Continent' to be explored, civilized and later
colonized by the white man. Dickens explicitly rejected overseas missions when
the work at home remained so obviously undone. However, from the 1840s
onward he too became involved in the construction and circulation of a number of
discourses of race.
Representing the Other
Notwithstanding his journalistic interest in the Empire, very few colonized others
actually appear in Dickens's fiction. The former slave Cicero in Martin Chuzzlewit
is one of die earliest examples, appearing almost incidentally during Martin and
Mark Tappley's disastrous attempt to seek their fortunes in America. Although
named after the famous Roman orator, Cicero remains conspicuously silent while
Mark relays the story of his life to Martin:
Why, when that there man was young—don't look at him while I'm a-telling
it—he was shot in the leg; gashed in the arm; scored in his live limbs, like
crimped fish; beaten out of shape; had his neck galled with an iron collar, and
wore iron rings upon his wrists and ankles. The marks are on him to this day.
When I was having my dinner just now, he stripped off his coat, and took
away my appetite. [A/C282]
Cicero seems totally unaware of any effect his body might have upon Mark. He
removes his coat, not to create a shock-effect, but presumably because he is too hot
and because, in a place where slavery is the norm, his injuries are not remarkable.
The battered physique of the slave may have been an everyday sight in North
America, particularly in the southern slave states, but for Mark it is completely
new and unfamiliar. The former slave's abused and scarred torso is, like those
documented in American Notes, a far more eloquent testament to his suffering than
any story he can tell, and even Mark is challenged by his many injuries. Mark
invests standard racial discourse with new meaning when he describes his new
friend as 'a man of colour' [MC 282], suggesting that Cicero's life has indeed been
colourful and it is not his black skin that is significant, but rather his scars. John
Bowen has astutely commented that, 'Mark is cautious about saying what Cicero
The Racial Other 59
is, insistent on non-linguistic signs—pictures, pantomime, Cicero's own body to

convey his meaning'.50 Mark's uncharacteristic reticence stems from a sensitivity
that he feels, but which he projects onto the un-self-conscious, implying that he
may feel somehow conspicuous if he sees that he is being discussed.
The Native of Dombey and Son is not offered the same consideration as
Cicero, although this shadowy figure is given more textual attention than Cicero's
rather fleeting appearance. The Native is the most conspicuous colonial other to
appear in Dickens's fiction. The ethnic background of The Mystery of Edwin
Brood's Neville and Helena Landless, the only other possible candidates, remains
somewhat ambiguous. It is difficult to be entirely certain of the nationality of the
Native of Dombey and Son. A servant, or almost a slave to a fairly peripheral, but
nevertheless entertaining character, his primary role in the novel is to reveal the
mindless cruelty of his master, Major Bagstock. A shadowy presence, the native
has no name and we never hear him speak, let alone complain. He becomes the
sole representative of an unspecified race, while the label 'the Native' is an ironic
misnomer, since he is culturally displaced in the cold climes of England, and the
only character in Dombey and Son who is not a native at all. Since Major
Bagstock is a former member of the Indian Army, it is strongly inferred that the
Native is Indian, yet this speculation is never confirmed by the text. He is
described with unusual vividness for such a minor character:
[He] wore a pair of ear-rings in his dark brown ears, and...his European
clothes sat with an outlandish impossibility of adjustment—being, of their
own accord, and without any reference to the tailor's art, long where they
ought to be short, short where they ought to be long, tight where they ought to
be loose, and loose where they ought to be tight—and to which he imparted a
new grace, whenever the Major attacked him, by shrinking into them like a
shrivelled nut, or a cold monkey... [DS 283-4]
He is clearly less than comfortable in his Western garb, and Rajeswari Sunder
Rajan has suggested that the Native might be classified as one of Homi Bhabha's
'mimic men'.5 However, there is nothing 'not quite, not white' about him; he is
not a hybrid, but blatantly and wholly other. The Western clothes which hang so
ill upon him are not the signs of an attempt to 'Turn white or disappear',52 but
rather they emphasize his difference and his subordination. The concept of
mimicry would imply an element of choice on the part of the Native and a
conscious decision to emulate the white man and to assimilate. His dress instead
signifies his subservience to Major Bagstock, who is unlikely to have allowed his
'scoundrel' to exercise autonomy with regard to his clothing. The Native is
rendered both absurd and exotic by the narrator's humorous descriptions of his ill-
suited garments, but his clothes by no means mark a desire to integrate,
subconscious or otherwise. Dickens in this instance is not caricaturing the 'other'
for aspiring to be something he is not, and while the Native is an object of fun, the
narrative voice clearly sympathizes with this 'shivering', 'miserable' and ill-treated
wretch.
Suvendrini Perera has usefully referred to the Native as a 'cipher of a servant'.
Not only is the Native a signifier of Bagstock's—and implicitly Britain's—
imperial mastery, his body absorbing blows, just as the Indian subcontinent fell
victim to the economic exploitation of the East India Company. The Native also
points indirectly to the source of Mr Dombey's wealth in the colonies. Thus he is
both sign and signifier, but he is also signified upon, not just by Dickens, but by
the novel's minor characters too. The Native is surrounded by conjecture, and as
he never speaks, he becomes a vehicle for the exotic fantasies of those around him.
In a parenthesis the narrator informs us that the 'unfortunate foreigner' was
'currently believed to be a prince in his own country' [DS 276, my italics], hinting
at the mutability of the Native's supposed identity. The word 'currently' is, then,
crucial to an understanding of the reinvention and reinterpretation of the 'dark
servant' [DS 273], as it suggests that a number of other conjectures as to his past
existence have already been made and discarded, a process crucial to casting a
character in the role of the subaltern. Indeed, as Homi Bhabha has argued, 'The
Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish
its own institutional and oppositional discourse', a comment which encapsulates
the Native's complete powerlessness in the face of the narratives woven around
him.53
Subject to every whim of his master, he is unable to speak up for himself and
is so oppressed that even his name has been taken away, and replaced with a
torrent of Bagstock's epithets: he is a scoundrel, he is a villain, he is a devil, he is a
Native—his true nature is never allowed to appear. The racially ambiguous
Neville Landless experiences a similar treatment under more sinister circumstances
in The Mystery of Edwin Drood when he finds himself apprehended under
suspicion for Edwin's disappearance. The members of the closeted Cloisterham
community are carried away by xenophobia in their attempts to conflate
criminality with racial difference:
Before coming to Cloisterham he had caused to be whipped to death sundry
'Natives'—nomadic persons, encamping now in Asia, now in Africa, now in
the West Indies, and now at the North Pole—vaguely supposed in Cloisterham
to be always black, always of great virtue, always calling themselves Me, and
everybody else Massa or Missie (according to sex), always reading tracts of
the obscurest meaning, in broken English, but always accurately
understanding them in the purest mother tongue...He had repeatedly said he
would have Mr Crisparkle's life. He had repeatedly said he would have
everybody's life, and become in effect the last man. [ED 184-5]
The conjecture surrounding the mysterious other world of the colonies, coupled
with prejudice, leads to the formulation of opinions completely lacking in any
factual basis. The past constructed for Neville here is quite frankly absurd, but it
demonstrates the community's willingness to embrace the myth of the violent
colonial on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence and to fabricate a past for him
accordingly. Although more resistant to this signification process than the Native,
as soon as Neville falls under suspicion of a crime, he too becomes caught up in
the prison-house of other people's language.
The Native, though, holds a wider importance as a subordinate figure whose
presence permits those normally lacking in power, such as servants, the ability to
The Racial Other 61
label him and to define themselves against him. His role is similar to that of
Cicero in Martin Chuzzlemt of whom Mark Tapley grimly asserts:
I engaged him for a very reasonable charge (out of my own pocket) to sit
along with me and make me jolly; and I am jolly; and if I was rich enough to
contract with him to wait upon me once a day, to be looked at, I'd never be
anything else. [A/C283]
Mark's jolliness is, throughout the novel, a type of linguistic foil against adversity;
the more difficult circumstances become, the jollier Mark purports to be. In this
instance Mark implicitly compares his own state to that of Cicero who has become,
as John Bowen reminds us, 'a servant to a servant' in working for Mark. Up to
this point Mark's own situation as servant and travelling companion to the
complaining and self-obsessed Martin has seemed an unenviable. However, by
contrasting his state with that of Cicero, he realizes (unlike the more obtuse
Martin) that his own situation is a remarkably liberated one. Like Sam Weller in
The Pickwick Papers he frequently uses irony and sarcasm as a means of airing his
grievances in front of his master, skilfully turning them into jokes so that Martin is
unable to protest.
The protagonists further along the social scale than the novel's servants (who
are alarmed by the 'tigerish' Native and 'the rolling of his eyes' [DS 449]) are
uninterested in his origins. Miss Tox—who aspires to be the second Mrs
Dombey—'was quite content to classify [him] as a "native", without connecting
him with any geographical idea whatever' [DS 84], while Bagstock, who
presumably holds the key to his identity, never once makes mention of it, nor
seems to consider his servant's past. The novel's final vision of the Native shows
Bagstock taking out his anger upon him at the fall of the House of Dombey:
The unfortunate Native, expressing no opinion, suffered dreadfiilly; not
merely in his moral feelings, which were regularly fusilladed by the Major
every hour in the day, and riddled through and through, but in his
sensitiveness to bodily knocks and bumps, which was kept continually on the
stretch. For six weeks after the bankruptcy, this miserable foreigner lived in a
rainy season of boot-jacks and brushes. [DS 815]
The idea of the Native under fire from the Major's words offers an important
insight into the damage that has been inflicted upon him through the signifying
process. Bagstock's physical violence mirrors the epistemic violence that has been
enacted in the attempt to rob the Native of what Gayatri Spivak would designate
his 'precarious Subject-ivity' through the theft of his ethnic identity.54 Also
reflected is, of course, the linguistic violence performed on the Native, resulting
from the act of signification both upon and against him.
Indeed, the true extent of both the Native and Cicero's subordination through
language can perhaps only be appreciated fully by comparing him to that other
famous Dickensian servant, Sam Weller of The Pickwick Papers. Spivak has
contended that, 'if the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a
subaltern any more'55 and Sam is a prime example of the subaltern who has talked
himself out of his position of servitude. Mr Pickwick may declare of his servant, 'I
allow him to take a good many liberties; for between ourselves, I flatter myself he
is an original, and I am rather fond of him' [PP 210], but it is Sam who, through
his endless negotiation of discourse, manages Mr Pickwick. Sam's manipulation
of his master is most evident when Pickwick is incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for
refusing to pay the costs and damages for the Bardell versus Pickwick trial for
breach of promise. The trial itself results from the linguistic dexterity of the
unscrupulous lawyers Dodgson and Fogg and a ridiculous charge that day to day
notes from Mr Pickwick to his landlady Mrs Bardell, requesting items such as
'chops and tomata sauce' for supper could be interpreted as declarations of love
and a proposal of marriage. Pickwick adamantly refuses to meet the costs of this
wilful misinterpretation, and declares his intention to remain imprisoned on
principle, because he is not guilty and therefore should not have to make
reparation. Sam Weller, however, realizes that the prison will eventually kill Mr
Pickwick and signifies upon him in Henry Louis Gates Jr's sense of the phrase by
telling him a story of a man who died because he insisted on eating crumpets. As
Sam declares to Pickwick: 'I takes my determination on principle, sir...and you
takes yours on the same ground; wich puts me in mind o' the man as killed his-self
on principle, wich o'course you've heerd on, sir'. And so Sam goes on to
chronicle the absurdity of Pickwick's stubbornness by telling him a story about
another equally resolute and unmoveable individual. Sam's actions bear a
remarkable resemblance to Gates's theory of signifying), a way for subjected
cultures to appropriate the master's language and play with it, through the slippage
of interpretation between the sign and signifier, and by telling stories to someone
that are ostensibly about others, but which really relate to their current predicament
and which critique her or his conduct. Although Gates has developed signifying)
as an essentially African-American manipulation of discourse, playing with
dominant white sign systems, it is not wholly inappropriate to ascribe this mode of
using the 'master's' language to trick him to Sam, who also occupies a position as
a subaltern.56
The Native certainly does not signify upon anyone, and his role in Dombey
and Son is, to draw attention to the very real dangers of remaining silent. Susan
Nipper, a servant in the Dombey household, uses words—the only real weapon she
possesses—to counter the patriarchal Mr Dombey. Susan's discourse is
remarkable for its sheer volume rather than any subtle manipulation and its
uncontrolled nature is evident in the fact that it does not contain any full stops. She
is a linguistic guerrilla and deploys speech as her only weapon in an endeavour to
talk herself out of the patriarchy that is Dombey's world. Susan's use of metaphor
is quite remarkable in its recognition of the marginalized position of women in the
novel, and it points to her refusal to submit and become as powerless as the Native.
She asserts to another character, Mrs Richards (a woman who has had her name
changed by Dombey from Toodles, on the grounds that it is lacking in dignity) that
she is nothing more than, 'a black slave and a mulotter' [DS 51] and she later
pronounces to Mr Dombey, 'I may not be an Indian widow Sir and I am not and I
would not so become but if I once made up my mind to burn myself alive, I'd do
it!' [DS 615]. Through enunciating her affinity to the Indian widows compelled to
commit sati, Susan attempts to break the bonds of male domination which have
The Racial Other 63
oppressed both her and her charge, Mr Dombey's daughter Florence. She
overwhelms Dombey with a barrage of words and signifies upon him with
metaphors. She is not alone in her efforts: both the second Mrs Dombey (who has
married for money and position) and her mother echo her outcry. The ghastly
Cleopatra (Edith Dombey's mother) comments, 'I began to be afraid, my dearest
Dombey, you were quite a Bashaw' [DS 431], while Edith wails, 'There is no slave
in a market; there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and
paraded, mother, as I have been, for ten shameful years' [DS 394]. Thus, both
Edith and her mother equate Dombey with the East, not just as the source of his
colonial wealth, but also as offering parallels for a tyranny that they perceive as
'not English'.57 The marriage market is, all the same, a very English form of
oppression and Edith's analogies accentuate its barbarism and undermine British
pretensions to civilization. A number of Dickens's other female characters
compare their condition to that of the slave. Caddy Jellyby complains of her
involvement in her mother's African work by declaring 'I won't be a slave all my
life' [BH 186], while the perpetually complaining Mrs Joe Gargery demands
wrathfully of her husband, 'why he had not married a Negress Slave at once?' [GE
92]. Edith's recognition of her state is nowhere near as liberating (but equally as
self-destructive) as Susan's outbursts. The Native, on the other hand, who as a
servant or near-slave occupies a similarly feminized position, does not articulate
his many grievances and so remains entrapped by them.
The Native may end the novel in a state of miserable subordination, but it is
obvious that the narrator's sympathies remain with him. Dickens's vision did not,
however, extend to allowing this colonial other even the possibility of rebellion
against his tyrannous blue master, just as Susan Nipper's emancipation through
speaking out is curbed through the loss of her position in the Dombey household.
The Native, then, constitutes the ultimate other—silent, elusive and compliant. His
is a state that other characters fear and resist lapsing into. He is a 'cipher of a
servant' whose identity has been completely effaced, but he is also an important
marker of oppression whose presence allows other, less passive and, importantly,
white working-class characters, to define themselves against him, and thus to avoid
his plight.
The Noble Savage
Outside of his fiction, Dickens's most controversial depiction of the colonial other
appeared when he was inadvertently dragged into a very public controversy, during
which discussions of the treatment of both slaves and Africans became conflated
and confused. In October 1849 he wrote to John Forster with the outline of a
proposal for an article for Household Words. The piece was to be, 'A history of
Savages, showing the singular respects in which all savages are like each other;
and those in which civilised men, under circumstances of difficulty, soonest
become like savages'.58 It was not until four years later that Dickens finally put
together the polemical 'Noble Savage' essay, which appeared as the lead article in
Household Words for 11 June, 1853. The piece itself is rather an anomaly and has
led critics like Sheila M. Smith to remark on its 'uncontrolled hysteria'.59 At a first
glance the article does not make pleasant reading, but it has been dismissed too
readily as a mere testimony to Dickens's growing racism during this period.
However, circumstances leading up to the writing of the article offer an important
insight into both its tone and the contrapuntalism of Dickens's stance on race in the
years before the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
To attempt to elide the manifest racism of 'The Noble Savage' would be
facile. Yet the willingness of the critics William Oddie and Patrick Brantlinger to
accept the article at face value as a torrent of vitriol may be attributed to an over-
estimation of the more overtly racist Carlyle's influence over Dickens in the early
1850s. Brantlinger has read the article's Darwinist urge to civilize the savage out
of existence through natural selection and the gradual spread of civilization as
evidence of Dickens's call for the 'liquidation by genocide of "niggers" and
"natives'".60 One explanation for this undue weighting of Carlyle's input is
undoubtedly a result of Dickens's dedication of Hard Times to his mentor in 1854.
The inscription, however, does not imply that he embraced Carlyle's every
opinion, nor can it be read as a direct endorsement of the sentiments of 'The
Nigger Question'.61 Rather, Dickens sought to place on record his well-
documented admiration for the author of Chartism and Past and Present and his
attacks on Utilitarianism and laissez-faire.
Dickens's allegiance to the abolitionist cause demonstrates that he is unlikely
to have been swayed by Carlyle's portrait of the pumpkin-eating 'Quashee' or his
assertions of the justice of the slavery of the weak to the strong.62 Dickens was
strongly committed to the emancipation of all slaves and believed that they could
eventually be integrated into society on an equal basis with white men. As he and
the regular Household Words contributor Henry Morley suggested, three years
after the publication of 'The Nigger Question* in an article entitled 'North
American Slavery': 'We think...that it is possible to combine with the duty of
emancipation the not less important duty of undoing the evil that has been done to
the slaves' minds, and of doing them some good service by way of atonement'.63
While Dickens understood that the evils of the slave system had resulted in the
degradation of the slave, Carlyle had registered in Latter-Day Pamphlets a
predestinarian belief in what he saw as the slave's innate inferiority and
irredeemable nature:
My friend, I grieve to remind you, but it is eternally the fact: Whom Heaven
has made a slave, no parliament of men nor power that exists on Earth can
render free. No; he is chained by fetters which parliaments with their millions
cannot reach. You can label him free; yes, and it is but labelling him a
solecism—bidding him be the parent of solecisms wherever he goes. You can
give him pumpkins, houses often pound rent, houses of ten-thousand pound:
the bigger candle you light within die slave-image of him, it will but show his
slave-features on the larger and more hideous scale. Heroism, manful heroism
is not his: many things you can give him, but that thing never. Him the
Supreme Powers marked in the making of him, slave; appointed him at his and
The Racial Other 65
our peril, not to command but to obey, in this world. Him you cannot
enfranchise, not him; to proclaim this man free is not a God's Gospel to other
men; it is an alarming Devil's Gospel to himself and to us all.64
In these two passages it is the differences between the two writers that are
noteworthy, as opposed to any similarities. Dickens's view of all men's
fundamental right to freedom was completely irreconcilable to Carlyle's rigid
vision of a pre-ordained hierarchy. Significantly, the 'North American Slavery'
article does not resort to the type of racial stereotyping on which Carlyle's
argument is so dependent. It would therefore seem unlikely that a mere nine
months later, Dickens's feelings on the issue would have altered so substantially as
to prompt him to risk his popularity by giving vent to a barrage of racist opinions.65
Some other factor must therefore have been responsible for the sudden shift in
perspective of 'The Noble Savage'. Dickens had certainly seen A.T. Caldecott's
famous 'Zulu Kafir Exhibition' at St. George's Gallery on 26 May, 1853 and, as
Bernth Lindfors has commented, the exhibition of 'incidents typical of Zulu life'
and its guidebook influenced some of the article's more descriptive passages.66
However, Dickens's apparent vitriol is at odds with Caldecott's light-hearted
spectacle and it would appear that the piece is also a reply to a series of articles by
Lord Thomas Denman, the former Lord Chief Justice. There were six articles
published between September and October 1852 in The Standard, which
condemned Dickens for his response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, attacked the satirical
Borrioboola-Gha venture of Bleak House and intimated that he was less than
committed to the work of the abolitionists. Denman, it would seem—along with
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Martineau—did not appreciate the satirical caricature
of the telescopic philanthropist, Mrs Jellyby, but instead he argued:
[Dickens] exerts his powers to obstruct the great cause of human
improvement—that which in general he cordially advocates. He does his best
to replunge the world into the most barbarous abuses that ever afflicted it. We
do not say that he actually defends slavery or the slave-trade; but he takes
pains to discourage by ridicule, the effort now making to put them down. We
believe, indeed, that in general terms he expresses just hatred for both; but so
do all those who profit or wish to profit by them, and who, by that general
profession, prevent the detail of particulars too atrocious to be endured.
For one who had seen the scars on the bodies of escapees, and who had responded
as emotionally as Dickens had in American Notes, to be grouped with slavers must
have been particularly galling. It would appear, however, that Dickens initially
attempted to placate Denman by outlining his support for emancipation with the
'Slavery' piece cited above, which appeared five days after The Standard's first
onslaught. Yet as Denman produced article after article, each becoming more
personal in their censure of his work, Dickens began to lose patience.
It was Denman's adoption of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle
Tom's Cabin, as a type of protege that annoyed Dickens even more than the attacks
on his own work. Although he praised Stowe's novel in public as 'a noble work;
fall of high power, lofty humanity; the gentlest, sweetest, and yet boldest writing',
in private he was less complimentary about its artistic merit.68 He implied in a
letter to his friend and regular correspondent, Mrs Richard Watson that a number
of Beecher Stowe's protagonists had been culled from existing sources, most
notably his own works:
She (I mean Mrs Stowe) is a leetle unscrupulous in the appropriation way. I
seem to see a writer with whom I am very intimate (and whom nobody can
possibly admire more than myself) peeping very often through the thinness of
the paper. Further I descry the ghost of Mary Barton, and the very palpable
mirage of a scene in the Children of the Mist...69
Although at this stage Dickens was more entertained than angered by the book's
shortcomings, its author's visit to England the following year altered his
perspective considerably. The Standard's articles were re-published in pamphlet
form in 1853, presumably to coincide with the trip, although Denman himself was
by now incapacitated by a stroke that was probably brought about by his tireless
commitment to abolition.70 Dickens may have been gallant in his assurances to
Denman's daughter that he had completely dismissed her father's part in the affair,
but he was also singularly defensive of Bleak House, arguing that 'No kind of
reference to Slavery is made or intended, in that connexion'.71
Mrs Stowe's visit was treated with a similar degree of attention to Dickens's
own voyage to the United States in 1842. A banquet was given in her honour at
the Mansion House on 2 May and she sat opposite Dickens. As Harry Stone has
noted, Forrest Wilson later described Dickens's toast to Mrs Stowe as, 'the most
restrained praise of herself and Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet was to hear publicly
expressed in the course of her entire British visit'.72 Dickens's coolness no doubt
stemmed at least partially from the irritation generated by Denman's articles, and it
is probable that the linking of his name to that of a woman he considered to be both
a plagiarist and an inferior author also annoyed him. Stone has argued
convincingly that Dickens may simply have been jealous of all the fuss, and this
explanation seems feasible. Along with Washington Irving (whom he admired
immensely), Dickens had been one of the first transatlantic literary celebrities and
he may well have resented the feting of a work that the Pre-Raphaelite painter and
poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was later to cruelly parody in 'Uncle Ned': 'Him tale
dribble on and on widout a break/Till you hab no eyes for to see;/When I reach
Chapter 41 had got a headache;/So I had to let Chapter 4 be'.73
Dickens may not have resorted to Rossetti's extremes, but he was certainly
unimpressed by Beecher Stowe, later referring to her memoirs, Sunny Memories of
a Foreign Land as 'Moony Memories'.74 Moreover, it would appear that Dickens
was anxious to publicly disassociate himself from the author of Uncle Tom, as less
than six weeks after his encounter with Mrs Stowe, 'The Noble Savage' appeared
in Household Words. The tone of the piece is completely at odds with anything he
had written in the past, and indeed, anything else he was writing at the time. There
is also no evidence of any significant public event that could have altered his
stance so rapidly. The beginning of the article reads like a reactionary assertion
from Dickens's later caricature of English intolerance, Mr Podsnap, with its
declaration, 'I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a
prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition' [RP 467]. In a manner as
The Racial Other 67
consistent as that of Podsnap was to become, the narrative voice (which I hesitate
to align with that of Dickens) continues to discuss at great length the very savage
in whom he professes not to believe. There are several different arguments in play
within the article, and the grotesque caricature of the savage as "cruel, false,
thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs;
a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome,
bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug9 [RP 467] is an attempt on the part of Dickens
to sever any perceived connection between himself and Mrs Stowe once and for
all. The hyperbolic effect of the succession of epithets renders the description
almost absurd, and it is a far cry from Dickens's more moderate observation that he
thought Uncle Tom, 'a little too celestial'.75
In beginning the piece with such an accumulation of negative images, Dickens
adopts the voice that Denman had attributed to him, in order to demonstrate the
sheer absurdity of his accusations that a number of pieces in Household Words
(
appeared[ed] to have been written for the taste of slave traders only'.76 Dickens
had not thwarted Denman's attacks by writing to appease him, so now he played
along with the allegations instead. After the introductory paragraphs, the tone
becomes much more moderate and is more akin to Dickens's own voice.
Essentially, the narrator offers several different views of the 'savage' which range
from disdain for his barbarity, to sympathy at his plight and annoyance at the
people of Exeter Hall. Shearer West has posited that 'By the mid-nineteenth
century the reading of the savage as a natural man had given way to the idea that
savagery resulted from a process of degeneration from a state of primal grace'.77
Dickens's essay was certainly attempting to explore these tensions, and it is
characteristic of his dialectic mode of thought that he would not necessarily seek to
reconcile them. The discussion of the 'savage' is by no means confined to the
African, but also encompasses the Ojibbeway Indians and the English working
classes too. It is clearly with irony that Dickens introduces the theatrical
impresario George Catlin and speaks of him as 'energetic' and 'earnest' [RP 468]
as Catlin's 1843-1844 display of Amerindians had been exposed as a hoax when
the 'exhibits' were discovered to be from the East End of London. There is
therefore a deliberate ambiguity as to whether it is to the East Enders in need of
missionary care that Dickens refers when he describes the 'savages' on show as
'wretched creatures, very low in the scale and very poorly formed' [RP 468] or to
the Ojibbeways. Dickens was, however, well known to be a great admirer of the
Native American people and lamented both privately, and in American Notes, their
shoddy treatment at the hands of settlers.
As with his earlier condemnation of the Crystal Palace, Dickens once again
registers a dislike for exhibitions in 'The Noble Savage'. He argues that the
Ojibbeways/Londoners were 'no better than the chorus at an Italian Opera in
England' (which he loathed), 'and would have been worse if such a thing were
possible' [RP 468, my brackets], which suggests that he regarded them as
displaced, and realized that the exhibition was choreographed and contrived.
Interestingly, Punch took a similar line on the displays in its article of the same
year, 'Thoughts on the Savage Lions of London: By a friend and a brother'-
piece that sheds light on Dickens's disapproval of the spectacle of savagery

through linking it to problems closer to home. The Punch poem concentrates on
the ways that Africans are exploited through shows, but more importantly for the
Dickensian agenda, it reminds readers that, 'in the back courts of St Giles's, it may
be,/Hordes of young savages there we could get:/But they've no fancy dresses to
set off their figures/And nothing is thought of an every-day sight;/And Uncle
Tom's roused such a penchant for niggers,/That dark skins must now take
precedence of white'.78 Punch's indictment inadvertently transforms Catlin's
deception into an ironic and symbolic act. The civilized nation was only interested
in the novelty of the African, and the only way the urban poor could compel the
eye of the telescopic philanthropist to fall upon them was through deception.
Dickens may not have explicitly stated this parallel in 'The Noble Savage', but his
cry at the end of 'The Niger Expedition', 'Look to your tents, O Israel! but see they
are your own tents!' [MP 134] would suggest that the belief was always at the
heart of his writing on the matter.
It is not so much the 'savage' Dickens attacks in his essay, but rather 'the
whimpering over him with maudlin admiration, and the affecting to regret him, and
the drawing of any comparison between the blemishes of civilisations and the tenor
of his swinish life' [RP 468]. Certainly, Dickens's criticisms of the misplaced
priorities of philanthropic organizations like Exeter Hall were nothing new. The
descriptions in 'The Noble Savage' may have been more scathing in tone, but they
were not significantly different from observations he made in the review of 'The
Niger Expedition' five years earlier. Denman had alluded to the review (which he
mistakenly attributed to Household Words, when it had in fact appeared in The
Examiner) as 'extremely facetious upon missionaries in general...particularly so
on those employed in Africa'.79
Dickens's review of Allen and Thompson's Narrative of the Niger Expedition
had appeared in August 1848—just a year before Carlyle's publication of 'The
Nigger Question'. The mission to the banks of the Niger had taken place in 1841
and it was an unmitigated disaster from beginning to end. The venture—organized
by the prominent abolitionist Buxton—aimed to promote 'civilization' through
trade—a somewhat anomalous concept to the modern reader, although certainly
not to the Victorians—and to prevent Africans from selling slaves to other nations.
Buxton had declared to the Colonial Secretary, Lord John Russell, that he sought
to see the people of Africa 'awakened to a proper sense of their own degradation'
[MP 119]. The journey had been troubled from the outset, with a problem with the
design of one of the steamers delaying commencement by several months. The
expedition was poorly planned, and little attention was paid to factors such as
climatic differences and local diseases. Of the three hundred and one who
journeyed to the Niger, forty-one people died of a tropical fever. In addition, the
indigenous population of the area showed little desire either to be converted or to
discontinue the profitable traffic in human flesh. Dickens was singularly withering
towards the efforts of the 'weird old women' of Exeter Hall and their unsolicited
telescopic philanthropy [MP 117]. He recounts the immense catalogue of the
voyage's lofty aims in a typically flippant tone and ends by remarking:
The Racial Other 69
A glance at this short list, and a retrospective glance at the great number of
generations during which they have all been comfortably settled in our own
civilised land, never more to be the subjects of dispute, will tend to materially
remove any aspect of slight difficulty they may present. [RP 118]
Here, Dickens registers the fact that civilization cannot be attained overnight in any
society. The 'catalogue' registers what has not yet been established in 'our own
civilised land9 and attacks the cultural and racial arrogance of Britain's attempts to
spread her flawed version of civilization across the globe. What is most important
about the article, though, is that it does not make any generalizations on the subject
of race. In the novels preceding Bleak House, Dickens's view of evil was
individual rather than institutional. Thus, characters like Quilp of The Old
Curiosity Shop or Mr Carker in Dombey and Son could be manifestly wicked
without Dickens's essential optimism being disturbed. Therefore, in 'The Niger
Expedition9 the evil of the attacks against the missionaries is attributed to King
Boy and King Obi as individuals, rather than to a collective race.
Like Bleak House, 'The Noble Savage' should be regarded as a transitional
work, in which Dickens's worldview is seen to alter significantly. The 'savage' of
the 1853 piece is a far more formulaic figure and the subject of a number of
sweeping statements on the behaviour of his kind. Admittedly, Household Words
had, in the past, published articles such as the "Cape' Sketches' of Alfred Whaley
Cole who had lived in Cape Town for five years in the early 1840s; although
ostensibly a piece about the native labour resources of the colonies, the article
degenerates into an attempt to ascribe different racial traits to different tribes.80
Thus the Bojesman language is dismissed as 'probably the most hideous language
in the world...It is more like the chattering of apes than the tongue of man,' and
the reader is warned of the Hottentot:
A most eccentric race—a most extraordinary mixture of good and evil
qualities. In fact, nearly every Hottentot is a kind of living paradox...He is a
drunkard and a thief...He will serve you for two or three months in sobriety
and honesty, then he will give you warning, pocket his wages, walk off to the
nearest canteen, and never be sober for a month, or for whatever time his
money may last...Unless your olfactory nerves are unusually obtuse, it is
advisable never to go into any room which a Hottentot damsel has been
putting in order for at least half an hour after her departure.81
As Dickens's contact with 'savages' of any description must have been minimal, it
is not unfair to suggest that many of his views of 'what the Noble Savage does in
Zulu Kaffirland' [RP 469] would have been influenced by articles such as Whaley
Cole's. Dickens's particularly early interest in the evolutionary debate must also
have altered his stance toward less developed races considerably, thus providing
some explanation for the marked shift in perspective between 1848 and 1853.
There is a definite dialogue between the review of 'The Niger Expedition' and
'The Noble Savage', in spite of Dickens's growing tendency towards racism later
in the 1850s. The conclusion of the latter is in contradistinction to its aggressive
beginning, with its emphasis on the similarities between British life and that of the
Noble Savage. The 'savage' is held up as a paradigm for all to avoid, and Dickens
remains unconvinced by the likes of Mrs Merdle in Little Dorrit, who extolled the
virtues of the uncomplicated existence of the South Sea Island savage.
Notwithstanding this fact, Dickens ends by reminding his readers, 'We have no
greater justification for being cruel to the miserable object, than for being cruel to a
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or an ISAAC NEWTON' [RP 473]. His final
reflection that 'the world will be all the better when [the savage's] place knows
him no more' [RP 473] may appear to be at odds with his previous sentiments.
However, reference back to 'The Niger Expedition' demonstrates that Dickens's
intention was neither to obliterate the savage, nor to impose 'Railroad
Christianization' upon him. In the words of 'The Niger Expedition':
To change the customs even of civilised and educated men, and impress them
with new ideas, is—we have good need to know it—a most difficult and slow
proceeding; but to do this by ignorant and savage races, is a work which, like
the progressive changes of the globe itself, requires a stretch of years that
dazzles in the looking at. It is not, we conceive, within the likely providence
of God, that Christianity shall start to the banks of the Niger, until it shall have
overflowed all intervening space. The stone that is dropped into the ocean of
ignorance at Exeter Hall, must make its widening circles, one beyond another,
until they reach the negro's country in their natural expansion. [RP 133]
It is the argument that Christianity will spread by example if it is seen to be
practised on the dispossessed who are closer to home that is implicit in the
concluding remarks of 'The Noble Savage'. Dickens's stance on racial matters
may have oscillated between contempt and pity by 1853, but by no means did he
hold the extreme and reactionary views that he manifested for a time during the
Indian Mutiny. The events of 1857 enabled Dickens briefly to formulate a more
consistent, but decidedly less pleasant, attitude towards other races, yet in many
ways the dialogic and conflicting opinions of the earlier writings were a great deal
more enlightened.
Notes
1 Lady Holland to Lady Augusta Fox. Quoted in The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume 2. 447.
2 Frances Trollope. Domestic Manners of the Americans. John Lauritz Larson (ed.).
New York: Brandywine Press: 1993. 127.
3 Linda Colley. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven & London: Yale
University Press, 1992. 351. Eric Williams has provided a superb analysis of the
factors underlying the burst of sudden zeal with his argument that Britain was only in a
position to abolish slavery once her own economy had been propelled towards
industrialization by the proceeds of the slave trade. [See Eric Williams. Capitalism
and Slavery. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961.] Indeed, world wide emancipation
was to the British advantage as it would rob potential competitors such as America of a
large source of capital which could be used to revolutionize their own manufacturing
infrastructures.
The Racial Other 71
4 Peter Fryer. 'Psuedo-Scientific Racism'. Anti-Racist Science Teaching. Dawn Gill

and Les Levidow (eds). London: Free Association Books, 1987. 179.
5 Soame Jenyns. The Works ofSoame Jenyns Esq. In Four Volumes: Including Several
Pieces Never Before Published, to Which are Prefixed Short Sketches of the History of
the Author's Family, and also of His Life; by Charles Nalson Cole, Esq. Volume III.
London: T. Cadell, 1770.
6 Fryer. * Pseudo-Scientific Racism'. 180. Dickens's Library held a copy of Elliotson's
Human Physiology into which was incorporated part of Blumenbach's Institutiones
Physical. [In J.H. Stonehouse (ed.). Reprints of the Catalogue of the Library of
Charles Dickens & W.M. Thackeray etc. London: Piccadilly Fountain Press, 1935. 42]
7 See KJ. Fielding. 'Dickens and Science?'. Dickens Quarterly. Volume 13, number 4.
December 1996. 200-216 and K.J. Fielding and Shu-Fang Lai. 'Dickens, Science, and
the Poetry of Science'. The Dickensian. Volume 93, number 441. Spring 1997, 5-11
for an extended discussion of Dickens's engagement with evolutionary theory.
8 Dickens's most famous attacks on Chadwick's reforms which stigmatized poverty may
be found in Oliver Twist and later in Our Mutual Friend's Betty Higden who lives in
terror of being unable to earn a living and having to end her days in the Workhouse.
9 Thomas Carlyle. 'Occasional Discourse of the Nigger Question'. In Critical &
Miscellaneous Essays, volume 4. London: Chapman & Hall Ltd, 1899. 349-50.
10 Shearer West (ed.). The Victorians and Race. Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1997. 3.
11 Sir George Stephen. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bleak House, Slavery and Slave Trade: six
articles by Lord Denman reprinted from the 'Standard'; with an article containing
facts connected with slavery by Sir George Stephen, reprinted from the 'Northampton
Mercury'. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1853. 49-50.
12 Linda Colley. Britons. 360.
13 Colley. Britons. 360.
14 Punch. Volume 20-21,1851. 209.
15 Punch. Volume 20-21, 1851. 161.
16 Quoted in Charles Dickens. American Notes for General Circulation. Arnold
Goldman and John Whitley (eds). 1842. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985.
347.
17 Frances Trollope. Domestic Manners of the Americans. 99.
18 Frances Trollope. Domestic Manners of the Americans. 99.
19 Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age.
London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1984. 168.
20 Anne Lohrli. Household Words: a Weekly Journal 1850-1859. Conducted by Charles
Dickens. Table of Contents, List of Contributors and their Contributions Based on the
Household Words Office Book. Toronto & Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973.
358. Where the author of a Household Words article is identified, the source is Lohrli.
21 Harriet Martineau. Society in America (In Two Volumes). Volume Two. New York
and London: Saunders & Otley, 1837. 124.
22 Quarles Quickens. English Notes: A Rare and Unknown Work being a Reply to
Charles Dickens's "American Notes". With critical comments by Joseph Jackson and
John H. Sargent. New York City: Lewis M. Thompson, 1920. The English Notes were
originally published in Boston in 1842, and conjectures as to the author's identity have
included Edgar Allen Poe and Samuel Kettell.
23 To John Forster, 15 March, 1842. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 3. 135.
24 'Change for the American Notes'. In Letters from London to New York by an
American Lady. London: Wiley & Putnam, 1843. 142-3.
25 See Charles Dickens. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 5. 668.
26 [John Capper and Samuel Sidney]. 'India Pickle'. Household Words. Volume 11,
number 272. June 9, 1855. 446-453. [John Capper]. 'The Mofiissil'. Household
Words. Volume 13, number 327. June 28, 1856. 556-559. For an in-depth discussion
of the articles and fiction relating to India see Chapters 5-7.
27 There are no extant records of any of speeches made with respect to slavery during
Dickens's first visit to America. See K.J. Fielding. The Speeches of Charles Dickens.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Fielding's work draws on contemporary newspaper
reports of the speeches, and the papers would have been sure to have reported any
public attack made by the author, as they concerned themselves with his every move.
28 To John Forster, 17 March, 1842. In John Forster. The Life of Charles Dickens. 1872-
4. London: Chapman & Hall, no date. 104-5.
29 Quoted in K.J. Fielding. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. 36.
30 To John Forster, 24 February [1842]. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 3. 90.
31 John Bowen 'Dickens's Black Atlantic'. Victorian Boundaries Conference. The
University of Exeter in conjunction with the Dickens Project, 4-7 July, 2002.
32 Martineau. Society in America. Volume Two. 120.
33 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 'To William E. Channing' in The Poetical Works of
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. London: Frederick Warne & Co, 1871. 20.
34 Longfellow. 'The Warning' in The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
35 Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. 1852.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986. 584. Uncle Tom rather implausibly dies
uttering words of forgiveness for his owner and oppressor Legree.
36 Sir George Stephen. In Six Articles by Lord Denman. 48.
37 'Change for American Notes'. 221.
38 Slavery was not however, the only issue responsible for the American Civil War, free
trade was also an extremely important factor.
39 Quoted in K.J. Fielding. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. 165.
40 [Franklin Fox & W.H. Wills]. 'A Cape Coast Cargo'. Household Words. Volume 2,
number 37. 7 December 1850. 252-257. [Alfred Whaley Cole]. 'Good Intentions: A
Story of the African Blockade'. Household Words. Volume 2, number 28. 5 October,
1850. 45-47. [Harriet Martineau]. 'Freedom or Slavery?' Household Words.
Volume 9, number 226. 22 July 1854. 537-542. See The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume Six, 236.
41 Martineau. Society in America. Volume One. 145.
42 'Nigger Peculiarities'. Punch. Volume One, 1841. 184.
43 To John Forster, 30 January, 1868. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 12. 27.
44 Nancy Stepan. Quoted in Patrick Brantlinger. Rule of Darkness: British Literature
and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1988. 175.
45 William Day. Slavery in America Shown to be Particularly Abominable, Both as a
Political Anomaly and an Outrage on Christianity. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co.
1841. 11. Dickens's library held a copy of Day's pamphlet and the two writers also
corresponded. On 19 January, 1843 Dickens complained to Day of the 'coexistence [of
slavery] with that monstrous Lie, the declaration of American Independence'. To
William Day, 19 January, 1843. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume Three. 427.
46 William Day. Slavery in America. 14.
47 Punch. Volume 2, 1841. 49.
48 Punch. Volume 28-29, 1855. 186.
49 Charles Wentworth Dilke. Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking
Countries During 1866 and 1867 (third edition). London: Macmillan & Co, 1869. 15.
The Racial Other 73
50 John Bowen. Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2000. 204.
51 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. "The Shadow of that Expatriated Prince': The Exorbitant
Native of Dombey and Son1. Victorian Literature and Culture, Volume 19, 1991. 85-
106. 90.
52 Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 1994. 61.
53 Bhabha. The Location of Culture. 31.
54 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988. 281.
55 Spivak. Quoted in Christine Macleod. "Black American Literature and the
Postcolonial Debate" in The Yearbook of English Studies: The Politics of Postcolonial
Criticism. Andrew Gurr (ed.). Volume 27, 1997. 62.
56 See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
57 Edith is, of course, just as much a sign of Dombey's wealth (she frequently refers to
herself as having been 'bought') as the Native is of Bagstock's imperial past.
58 To John Forster, 7 October, 1849. Charles Dickens. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volumes. 621-2.
59 Sheila M. Smith. The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and
1850s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. 80.
61 Originally published in Eraser's Magazine in 1849 under the less controversial title of
"The Negro Question', the article was re-issued in 1853 as an 'Occasional Discourse on
the Nigger question'.
62 Carlyle. 'The Nigger Question'. 360.
63 [Charles Dickens and Henry Morley]. 'North American Slavery'. Household Words.
Volume 6, number 1. 18 September, 1852. 5. Dickens later claimed that he was only
responsible for the first paragraph of the article and its praise of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
However, the editors of the Pilgrim letters suggest that he was being disingenuous and
probably wrote a number of other passages relating to Uncle Tom's Cabin. See: To the
Hon. Mrs Edward Cropper, 20 December, 1852. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume 6. 826.
64 Carlyle. Latter-Day Pamphlets. 249.
65 The backlash against Carlyle's 'Nigger Question' had indeed been extreme, and
journals such as Punch led the way in condemning the Sage of Chelsea. In 'A Black
Statue to Thomas Carlyle' [Punch. Volume 18, 1850. 19] it is suggested that he was
to 'be rewarded by the West India planters for his late advocacy of the 'beneficent
whip' and the Kentuckian wrath with which he has ail-but destroyed 'Black Quashee'
the wretch who will not work among sugar-canes, unless well paid for his sweat'. The
piece goes on to assert that a statue to honour him will be erected in Jamaica by the
slave owners, and that miniatures should be made available to Virginian slavers.
66 Bernth Lindfors. 'Charles Dickens and the Zulus'. African Literature Today: Insiders
and Outsiders. Volume 14. 127-140.
67 Denman. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bleak House, Slavery and Slave Trade. 5. Harry
Stone's article 'Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe'. [Nineteenth-Century
Fiction. Volume 12, 1957-8. 188-202] has been particularly useful in outlining the
impact of the Denman articles and Dickens's attitude towards Harriet Beecher Stowe.
68 [Charles Dickens and Henry Morley]. 'North American Slavery'. 1.
69 To the Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 22 November, 1852. Charles Dickens. The Letters
of Charles Dickens. Volume 6. 807.
70 See The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 6, 236.
71 To the Hon. Mrs Edward Cropper (Denman's daughter), 20 December, 1852. Charles
Dickens. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 6. 825.
72 Stone. 'Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe'.
73 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 'Uncle Ned'. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr. Figures in
Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self. 1987. Oxford and New York: Oxford
74 H.L. Knight. 'Dickens and Mrs Stowe'. 1976. Dickens Studies Annual. Volume 5.
1980. 57. Dickens was rather conveniently ill when Mrs Stowe attempted to call on
him at home, and his wife was also unable to see her because she was attending him.
75 To the Duke of Devonshire, 29 October 1852. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume 6. 787.
76 Denman. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bleak House, Slavery and Slave Trade. 6.
77 West(ed.). The Victorians and Race. 37.
78 Pimcfc, Volume 25, 1853. 38.
79 Denman. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bleak House, Slavery and Slave Trade. 7.
80 Lohrli. Household Words. 229. Cole was to return to South Africa permanently in
1856, to pursue successful legal and political careers.
81 [Alfred Whaley Cole] "Cape' Sketches'. Household Words. Volume 2, number 31.
October 26 1850. 118.
Chapter 4
Red Tape and Circumlocution:

The Crimean War
'I wish he could sit, with my pen and paper, and write a book, 'Hard Times in the
Crimea'. Only just what is passing in front of my comfortable little tent, would
give him plenty of matter'.1 [Captain Henry Clifford, 16 December 1854]
'Everybody is miserable.. .about the Crimea. I have an old belief that our Political
Aristocracy will ruin this land at last, and altogether London looks gloomy'.2
The Crimean War was, along with the 1851 Great Exhibition and the Indian
Mutiny of 1857-9, a key public event that preoccupied Dickens throughout the
1850s, and which came to represent for him all that was wrong with his country,
both in foreign and domestic terms. The war was perhaps one of the most
anomalous military campaigns of the nineteenth century, in that what was
undoubtedly a military and administrative disaster was rapidly reinvented as a
national triumph once Britain had finally defeated Russia. In 1898, the editor of
the Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen commented on a 'curious
delusion of the time.. .that the Crimean War implied the moral regeneration of the
country'.3 Writers like Charles Kingsley or Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as Poet
Laureate, were certainly complicit in propounding a positive view of the war as a
time of spiritual revivification. However, Stephen's observation does not account
for the resistance of many public figures—including George Eliot, William
Gladstone and, perhaps most defiantly of all, Dickens—who refused to succumb to
what was almost a national impulse to gloss over or rationalize what had been, at
root, a total catastrophe. While Eliot and Gladstone were clearly extremely
distressed at this glorification of the fighting, for Dickens the mismanagement in
the Crimea contributed to a rising anger that was not to be fully played out until the
end of the 1850s.
Britain's involvement in the Crimea was a result of a long-standing suspicion
of the Russian Tsar, Nicholas I's expansionist ambitions surrounding the moribund
Ottoman Empire. He famously described Turkey as the 'sick man' of Europe,
when attempting to entice Britain to join him in carving up its holdings.4 The
British, however, had no interest in taking formal possession of these declining
territories, yet they were anxious at the prospect of the spread of Russian tyranny,
particularly when the declining Ottoman Empire could perhaps be propped up and
the status quo maintained. Even more alarming than the sheer mass of land upon
which the Tsar had designs—in particular he desired access to the Mediterranean
through the Bosphorous—was the realization that Nicholas could effectively block
the land route to India through the acquisition of territory in Asia and the Middle
East. Britain therefore allied herself with her relatively recent adversary, France in
order to thwart the Tsar's aims. Following Nicholas's proclamation of himself as
the defender of the rights of the ten million Orthodox Christians under the
sovereignty of the Turkish Sultan, his intentions were seen to pose a serious threat
to the Concert of Europe (formed in 1815 to preserve the balance of power on the
Continent), particularly in the wake of the Russian invasion of Moldavia and
Wallachia on 1 July 1853. By January 1854 Britain and France had moved fleets
to the Black Sea at Turkey's request, although it was still hoped that the crisis
could be resolved through diplomatic means.
The British Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen was totally opposed to any kind of
military campaign and sought to avert a war at any cost that would not compromise
British interests or the sovereignty of Turkey. The secretary to the diplomat
Stratford de Redcliffe, Ambassador at Constantinople, played upon the oriental
imagery evoked by the exotic sultanate and dubbed the multitudinous peace
proposals exchanged between the ruling powers of Europe the 'one thousand and
one notes', and this allusion to the Arabian Nights stories was repeatedly referred
to in war reports and inquiries into its mismanagement.5 While the Illustrated
London News predicted in February 1854 that any war would be over in less than
three months, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were less optimistic and realized
that a military campaign against Russia was likely to be more protracted. The
royal couple were keenly aware that Aberdeen's commitment to hostilities was less
than whole-hearted. Equally, they realized that Aberdeen had only allowed
himself to be swayed towards armed conflict when it became clear that it was the
only way he could hold his coalition cabinet together and prevent Lord Palmerston,
Lord John Russell and what he perceived as their party of war-mongers from
gaining office. Just three years after his Great Exhibition to promote international
peace and understanding, Prince Albert was to see his plans for harmony between
nations in tatters and his adopted country was forced to reassess its image of itself
as an advanced, efficient and dominant world power.
In spite of his conviction that Britain should resolve her own affairs before
intervening overseas, Dickens understood the need for hostilities against Russia,
and was initially supportive of what was essentially a colonial war, fought not only
to maintain the balance of power in Europe, but also to protect Britain's interests in
the Balkans and beyond. While Thomas Carlyle lamented what he saw as the
sacrifice of lives to a conflict brought about by newspaper editors, Dickens's early
reactions were effusively patriotic, blending ironic self-parody with serious
support.6 Dickens wrote to the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell from France, with the
exuberance that characterized many of his letters to her:
We have an immense camp here, with I don't know how many thousand men
in it. The best of the business is, that although it is within a mile of this house,
we know nothing about it, except from reading The Times. For the glory of
England, I have hoisted the Union Jack on a haystack. If you happen to come
into these parts and see the flag of your country floating on top of an
Red Tape and Circumlocution 77
exceedingly high hill, you will know the spot where your countryman will be
proud to see you.7
Although Dickens is clearly lampooning the British tendency to rally during times
of crisis, his commitment to the campaign is certainly genuine. In the early 1850s,
Household Words carried a large number of general interest articles designed to
stimulate interest in Turkey. Pieces such as William Blanchard Jerrold's 'The
Turk at Home' and Murray's 'The Roving Englishman', which appeared in March
1854 after the Guards had left for the Crimea, sought to assert Turkish civilization
and to dispel myths of barbarism surrounding the Empire through offering insights
into the daily lives of its ordinary people.8 Animosity against the Tsar was also
incited through articles like the novelist Eliza Lynn's [later Eliza Lynn Linton]
'The True Story of the Nuns of Minsk' which drew attention to the previous
cruelties committed by the Tsarist regime in the name of religion. Nicholas I's
ruthless persecution of a group of Catholic nuns (who had refused to adopt the
Orthodox faith when the Episcopal body of the Uniate signed the act of recantation
in 1839) is detailed, and Lynn outlines for her readers how these defenceless nuns
were tortured in the name of the Tsar. Given Nicholas's recent proclamation of
himself as defender of the Orthodox faith in the Ottoman Empire, the piece clearly
seeks to dispel any lingering sympathies for his cause.
The Czar has still some partisans left in England: not many, certainly; but
some, both influential and sincere, who believe in the generosity of his
protection, and the truth of his religious zeal; who accept his version of the
history of the war, and see him only as the conscientious defender of his
Church, regarding his occupation of the Principalities as the simple demand
for tolerance towards his co-religionists, and die slaughter at Sinope as the
energetic expression of his philanthropy. We would convert these men—
many of whom are worth converting—and prove to them what religion and
toleration mean with the Czar.9
The politics of this piece are extremely overt, and it is obvious that at this point
Household Words regarded the war as a necessity. Other snippets such as Henry
Morley's 'At Home with the Russians' sought to differentiate the Russian people
from their leader by pointing to the despotism under which they were forced to
live.10
More astute contributors like Dickens's protegS George Augustus Sala were,
however, quick to draw attention to the mania for articles relating to the
hostilities.1 In addition to poking fun at the public's rapid accumulation of
fascinating facts about Turkey, Russia and the British campaign, Sala also suggests
that the British working classes are more enlightened than they had been during the
Napoleonic Wars. He asserted in an article of July 1854:
It is comfortable now-a-days to compare these crude and prejudiced views of
matters [in the early years of the century], with the calm, earnest, and
intelligent manner in which the people discuss the progress and conduct of the
war. Impatience of taxation may yet exist, but ignorant impatience is no more.
We know—in short, we WILL know—what we go to war for, and why; and
though the wicked jack-booted Czar is turned to considerable account as a
mark for caricature, as the moral acuity or adornment of every tale in a

political street-ballad, we don't make Nicholas a boguey for our children.12
What is most interesting about this excerpt is its calm acceptance of war taxation
(the addition of taxes to staple goods like bread and milk) an issue that Household
Words had addressed (although, importantly, not attacked) in "The Quiet Poor'
earlier in the year.13 Neither Henry Morley—the author of 'The Quiet Poor'—nor
Sala seems to have been particularly indignant at the way the burden of the war
had fallen on the shoulders of the working classes. While Morley claims to be
examining the impact of 'war prices' on the working poor, he never really
addresses the issue. Rather, his article is an account of yet another 'slumming
expedition', this time to Bethnal Green in the East End of London. He highlights
the atrocious, squalid conditions endured by men and women being systematically
poisoned by emissions from factories whose owners are undeterred by a too-lenient
law, and also advocates the need to abolish the Law of Settlement. However, the
article's initial focus shifts after the first paragraph, and the reader never learns
how the war has hit those at the bottom of the social scale. It was only later, when
evidence of negligence, both at home and in the Crimea, came to light that
Dickens's journal adopted a more confrontational stance.
The excuse of the war against Russia was rapidly adopted by the governing
classes as an explanation for stasis on the domestic front. The fears that Dickens
articulated in Bleak House through the telescopic philanthropist Mrs Jellyby,
unable to put her own house in order before interfering overseas, seemed to have
become a ghastly reality with the dropping of Russell's Reform Bill. While Punch
viewed the abandonment of electoral reform as 'A Struggle Between Duty and
Inclination' [see Figure 4.1 in which Russell is depicted in a soldier's uniform,
reluctantly leaving his beloved bill behind in order to go to war], Dickens's
interpretation of duty lay much nearer to home. The negligence that seemed to be
sanctioned by the war ran even deeper than the franchise bill, and extended to the
most basic issues of social reform such as sanitation and hygiene. The first signs
of Dickens's discontentment with the government's indifference to domestic issues
emerged in September 1854 in a leader he wrote entitled 'It is not Generally
Known'. The piece takes the opportunity to condemn the undemocratic electoral
process by portraying Parliament as a type of exclusive club, serving only its own
interests. Dickens is highly satirical in attacking the lack of affordable
entertainment available to the working classes, and once again invokes the Crystal
Palace as a target for his spleen. This time he refers to the structure to hit out at
those who had claimed that the workers would degenerate into drunken debauchery
should they be permitted to drink alcohol during their weekend excursions to
Sydenham, where the palace been re-assembled as a sort of large amusement
park.14 The glass palace for which Dickens had expressed so much contempt at the
beginning of the decade now became inseparable, in his imagination, from
Britain's other less-than-successful attempts to assert herself on the world stage.
Thus, in November 1854—a significant turning point in Household Words's stance
towards the war—Dickens wrote to his friend Mrs Richard Watson of the:
A STRUGGLE BETWEEN DUTY AND INCLINATION.
4.1 'A Struggle Between Duty and Inclination'. Punch. 22 April 1854.165
'[T]errific Puffery of the Crystal Palace: which appears to me, in respect of

puffery and pretence, to be the most gigantic Humbug ever mounted on a
long-suffering people's shoulders'.15
At times of national distress, Dickens adopted a curiously Gradgrindian persona,
and the Crystal Palace became for him a frivolous monument to British self-
aggrandisement and pomposity, not to mention a waste of resources and energies,
which could have been better applied to improving social distress. In a nutshell; if
the British could co-ordinate the building of an ornate palace, an international
display and that glass house's relocation, then why could they not apply the same
energies to improving slum areas in London or running the war in the Crimea
efficiently?
In Dickens's mind, the pristine army that had marched away in April to
trounce the Russians was itself part of the 'puffery', another gigantic bluff which
could not sustain itself in the face of nepotism and maladministration. By
November 1854 Household Words had begun its campaign to focus public
attention on domestic matters, with several articles spawned by the cholera
epidemic that had swept across Britain in June and July. Henry Morley's 'A Home
Question' authoritatively drew attention to the fact that the number of preventable
deaths from cholera in both Britain and the Crimea would far exceed the number of
battle fatalities even if the war in the East were to persist for another year or two.
Indeed, by the beginning of November 1854, the death toll in London as a result of
cholera stood at over 10,000. Morley was particularly scathing on the subject of
parliamentary inertia and took the radical and—as many saw it—irresponsible step
of calling on the working classes to rise up:
During the past session, upon the excuse that War was coming, Parliament
joyfully did nothing for the welfare of the people. The removal of some grave
social evils...had been promised, but the merest fiction of preoccupation with
a subject which required little or no parliamentary discussion, was held
sufficient to excuse in our lawmakers the neglect of almost all their proper
duties. So it was when war was coming: and we shall fare no better now that
war is come; unless we take pains to help ourselves. It is precisely in a land
burdened with foreign war that a true statesman would labour most to
compensate for trouble so incurred by the relief of home vexations and
distresses. Plans for the bettering of our social state are precisely the plans
which ought not, when we are paying war taxes, to be inopportune. The
calamity of war is doubled, if we must needs stand still in our civilisation
while it lasts.16
Morley continues to list a new six-point 'people's charter' for reform, for which he
suggests the workers should agitate. By this point Dickens was keen to at least be
seen to incite revolt (which a deep-rooted faith in the essential nobility of the
worker prevented him from envisaging as violent in form). Several pieces such as
his article To Working Men' called upon the disenfranchised masses to make their
voices heard and call for basic sanitary reforms, suggesting to the workforce that it
was their obligation and their right to do so.17 In late 1854, Dickens was still able
to feel sufficiently confident in the energy of the people to believe that his writings
could make a difference. Nevertheless, as Little Dorrit attests, by 1855 he was all
too aware that the sloth he had attributed to the governing classes was in fact a
wave of apathy that seemed to have spread across the nation as a whole. No one
was prepared to take responsibility for the state of the nation, and nobody seemed
willing to act.
Dickens was particularly indignant at evidence of official incompetence on the
domestic front. The government had responded to the cholera crisis by removing
the Sanitation Commissioner Edwin Chadwick from the Board of Health, a move
which for Dickens epitomized the art of government according to the
Circumlocution Office. He seemed to be genuinely baffled by working-class
passivity in the face of such uncaring ineptitude and attempted to rally them to
show their discontent in his article, 'To Working Men'. His intentions are made
clear in a letter to Angela Burdett Coutts in which he charts his annoyance at the
Government and its failure to take responsibility for the people:
I am sorry you are in a Maze about the article to Working Men—which was
written by a friend of yours. Its meaning is that they will never save their
children from the dreadful and unnatural mortality now prevalent among them
(almost too murderous to be thought of), or save themselves from untimely
sickness and death, until they have cheap pure water in unlimited quality,
wholesome air, constraint upon little landlords like our Westminster friends to
keep their property decent under the heaviest penalties, efficient drainage, and
such alterations in building Acts as shall preserve open spaces in the closest
regions, and make them where they are not now. That a worthless
Government which is afraid of every little interest in the closest regions and
trembles before the vote of every dust contractor, will never do these things
for them or pay the least sincere attention to them, until they are made election
questions and the working-people unite to express their determination to have
them, or to keep out of Parliament by every means in their power, every man
who turns his back upon these first necessities. It is more than ever necessary
to keep their need of social Reforms before them at this time, for I clearly see
that the War will be made an Administration excuse for all sorts of
shortcomings, and that nothing will be done when the cholera comes again.
Let it come twice again, severely,—the people advancing all the while in the
knowledge that, humanly speaking, it is like Typhus Fever in the mass, a
preventable disease—and you will see such a shake in this country as was
never seen on Earth since Sampson pulled the Temple down upon his head.18
The image of Samson [Judges XVI, 25-30] wreaking destruction is one that
Dickens resorts to again in A Tale of Two Cities to illustrate the strength of popular
discontent and the devastation that the working classes could cause if basic social
reforms continued to be neglected. This private letter displays Dickens's agitation
at those who refuse to govern. In 4To Working Men', then, he calls upon the
working people, not so much to incite their fervour, as to frighten his upper- and
middle-class readership into taking action, just as in the letter above, he takes a
perverse kind of pleasure in scaring Miss Coutts. In spite of his encouragement,
the idea of the people rising up remained, for Dickens, an apocalyptic scenario, but
one that was certain to ensue if official negligence persisted.
During the early months of the Crimean campaign, Dickens was notable for
his attempts to support his country's troops. In addition to despatching collections
of his work to the front, he and Miss Coutts commissioned a drying machine in
January 18SS, after it became apparent that such a device would be of service in
drying uniforms and bandages. Nonetheless, it became clear to Dickens that he
was among the few prepared to act upon his feelings. Key influences upon
Dickens were men like his friend the politician, diplomat and archaeologist Austen
Henry Layard, who had returned to Britain after witnessing the disorganized
shambles following the Battle of the Alma, determined to reveal the incompetence
that was prolonging the war and killing British soldiers. Layard's anger made
Dickens aware of the problems in the East before they became accepted as
common knowledge at home, and enabled him to accept the shocking accounts of
The Times when they began to appear in October 1854.
For Dickens, the Crimean disaster precipitated a crisis relating to his sense of
Britain's identity, but which became entwined with a number of less public
concerns. The biographer, Edgar Johnson, has eloquently described the all-
encompassing despair with which Dickens had already begun to view the world in
the early 1850s, and which seems to have been exacerbated by the nepotism and
red-tape that characterized Britain's involvement in the Crimea:
The sharpness of his personal unrest was intensified by the feelings with
which he looked upon the world. His own disappointments were not merely
for him among the unlucky accidents in a structure that on the whole worked
reasonably well. The areas of individual happiness had come to seem no more
than islands in an ocean of social misery. It was not that he believed the
cosmos radically evil; he was too inveterate a fighter for yielding to despair.
No one was further than Dickens from the Byronic mood of futility or the
erratic cynicism he had tried to portray in Steerforth. Nor did he believe that
human nature was intrinsically bad. But he did feel that the entire machinery
of society was built upon principles of greed and class interests that
systematically frustrated the general welfare.21
Whereas in the past Dickens had been angrily indignant at cases of social injustice,
he had hoped to remedy them through exposing abuse of poWer and neglect of duty
in his work. However, by the 1850s his sense of evil in the world had assumed
new proportions. While he had addressed institutional corruption through the
hopelessness induced by the Fleet Prison for debtors in The Pickwick Papers or the
inhumanity of the workhouse in Oliver Twist, the evil he depicted had always
assumed a human face. The early novels are characterized by their optimistic
belief that simply drawing attention to the often comical depravity of men and
women like the ridiculous Bumbles would suffice to nip it in the bud. The preface
to the 1867 edition of Oliver Twist is perhaps a case in point, where Dickens points
out to his readers the importance of his role in bringing such nether worlds as the
slum area and rookery, Jacob's Island to the attention of the public. In the
preface's final paragraph he succeeds in taking an ironical swipe at the reactionary
Alderman, Sir Peter Laurie who had denied the existence of such a place, while at
the same time Dickens implicitly pointed to the reform work that had resulted from
his own depiction of a world that had previously been unknown:
In the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty, it was publicly declared in
London by an amazing Alderman, that Jacob's Island did not exist, and never
had existed. Jacob's Island continues to exist (like an ill-bred place as it is) in
the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-seven, though improved and
much changed. [OT^xvii]
The novels following David Copperfield, however, are notable for their marked
shift in tone as a result of Dickens's realization that the ills he had in the past
attributed to isolated individuals were in reality embedded in the system. His
socio-political critique became structural with the realization that the system, as he
saw it, was rotten to the core and, like the Court of Chancery in the earlier Bleak
House, was spreading its pestilence everywhere.
At least part of Dickens's frustration must be attributed to a growing feeling of
powerlessness. Like Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit, he had initially fought
against the bastions of 'HOW NOT TO DO IT' [LD 104], he, like his protagonist
was soon to become wearied by the fight. Lionel Trilling has drawn important
parallels between the exhausted Clennam and his creator in the mid-1850s.22
However, a similar frustration and anger may be detected in Bleak House.
Dickens's critique of the bourgeois abdication of social responsibility was largely
based around the middle-class retreat from the public sphere. Characters like
Esther Summerson were simply unable to deal with the large number of problems
in the macrocosm and therefore closeted themselves away in private domestic
worlds, which repudiated the very existence of urban decay and its resulting social
inequalities.23 Esther alone is unable to remedy the Condition of England; instead,
she can only round up representatives of the poor and needy, like Jo the crossing-
sweeper or Charley, who becomes her little maid, and intern them in Bleak House.
As Bleak House demonstrates, Dickens had become increasingly impatient with
the solipsistic denial of the plight of the urban poor, and advocated a channelling of
individual, private philanthropy into the public domain.
At least part of Dickens's commitment to the war up until 'October 1854 must
be attributed to the fact that he was residing in France, where initial organization of
forces was far superior to that of Britain. According to the British Surgeon-
General, Thomas Longmore, in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign
the mortality rate amongst British troops was calculated at over sixty per cent per
annum from disease alone.24 Although whispers of official incompetence had
begun to filter back to Britain in letters home, it was initially believed that
complaints were exaggerated. The editor of The Times, John Delane, whom
Dickens had known since 1847, had at first been reluctant to accept the veracity of
reports by his correspondents Thomas Chenery, George Dascent and, most
famously, William Howard Russell. Nevertheless, an excursion to witness the
Crimean landing of September 1854 soon changed his mind, as he witnessed at
first hand the deplorable lack of medical facilities.
In spite of Delane's personal friendship with Lord Aberdeen, the newspaper's

pro-government stance was rapidly reconfigured. From October 1854, it began a
shaming campaign designed to make the public aware of blunders like the despatch
of unripe, unground coffee to the men and the generally appalling conditions under
which they were expected to live. Among the most important responses of The
Times was Dascent's damning expose of 23 December 1854:
We have defied the largest army in the world, and, if we have not backed our
challenge with quite sufficient strength or promptitude, we have at least made
an effort beyond all former example. At this moment it would be rash even to
conjecture the fate of those hardy survivors of the 54,000 men...Not a rail, not
a "navvy," and but a few "huts," have yet left these shores. Immense
quantities of warm clothing, of potted meats, and Christmas dinners, and we
know not what besides, are still in our harbours...There is no disguising the
matter. We are not speaking from our own correspondence only. We are not
saying what we think alone. We say, on the evidence of every letter that has
been received in this country, and we echo the opinion of almost every
experienced soldier or well-informed gentleman, when we say that the noblest
army England ever sent from these shores has been sacrificed to the grossest
mismanagement. Incompetency, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official
indifference, favour, routine, perverseness, and stupidity reign, revel, and riot
in the camp before Sebastopol, in the harbour of Balaklava, in the hospitals of
Scutari, and how much nearer home we do not venture to say.25
The piece was followed up by a series of 'letters home' revealing the full extent of
the organizational shambles that left troops freezing without winter uniforms and
lacking even roofs over their heads. While the Illustrated London News poured
scorn on The Times's campaign, claiming that the letters were exaggerations and
ridiculing the emotive language of its columns, Dickens was swift to ally himself
with Delane when the abuses came to light. In June 1855 he made the important
gestures of acknowledging the newspaper's role in raising his spirits and showing
Delane that he was not alone in his mission to expose the blundering of the
respective Aberdeen and Palmerston administrations. Speaking at the third
meeting of the Administrative Reform Association on 27 June, 1855 Dickens
declared:
When the Times newspaper proved its almost incredible case, in reference to
the ghastly absurdity of that vast labyrinth of misplaced men and misdirected
things which made England unable to find on the face of the earth, an enemy
one-twentieth part so potent for the misery and ruin of her noble defenders as
she has been herself, I believed that the gloomy silence into which the country
fell, was by far the darkest aspect in which a great people had been exhibited
for very many years...With shame and indignation lowering among all classes
of society, and this new element of discord piled on the heaving basis of
ignorance, poverty and crime, which is always below us—with little adequate
expression of the general mind, or apparent understanding of the general mind,
in Parliament.26
Russell's reports had spurred him not only to join the Reform Association, they
also encouraged him to continue with his own campaign to end the system of Tite
Barnaclism under which the ship of state was sinking fast. Dickens had initially
felt sufficiently confident in the influence Household Words held over the public to
write only half-jokingly to his trusted friend and editorial assistant, W.H. Wills, 'I
don't know what Forster expects to ensue from Mr Bull's Somnambulist, but, I
think, the Downfall of the Ministry at least'.27 His optimism was, however, short-
lived and the pervasive public inertia added to his feelings of depression and anger.
At the beginning of 1855 the tone of Dickens's articles shifted so that they
were no longer indictments specifically targeted at the government, but invectives
directed against everyone. He berated the general public for its wilful refusal to
face up to the unpleasant reports from the Crimea and in a hard-hitting move
actually implicated those who were content to do nothing in the deaths and misery
on the front. His article of February 1855, 'That Other Public' goes so far as to
suggest that there are two publics; one that is worldly wise and all-seeing and
another that can be hoodwinked:
It is impossible to over-state the completeness with which our Public have got
to the marrow of the true question arising out of the condition of the British
Army before Sebastopol. Our Public know perfectly, that, making every
deduction for haste, obstruction, and natural strength of feeling in the midst of
goading experience, the correspondence of THE TIMES has revealed a
confused heap of mismanagement, imbecility, and disorder, under which the
nation's bravery lies crushed and withered. Our Public is profoundly
acquainted with the fact that this is not a new kind of disclosure, but that
similar defection and incapacity have before prevailed at similar periods until
the labouring age has heaved up a man strong enough to wrestle with the
Misgovernment of England and throw it on its back.28
In so dividing the public into two factions, Dickens was able to condemn its
dogged blindness to the Cabinet's ineptitude without offending his readers. In
suggesting that there is a second and wise public, he is clearly offering readers the
chance to align themselves with the relatively small group of men and women who
appreciated that only by confronting the problem of mismanagement could it be
resolved. He also understood that to essentialize 'the public' as a single entity was
a discursive construct, just as it is today. The fury that marks articles from later
that year is certainly evident in Dickens's demand, 'where is that other
Public...whom it would seem that not even plague, pestilence and famine, battle
murder and sudden death can rouse'.29 Yet at this point he was reluctant to believe
that the ordinary men and women of Britain could be so complacent and lacking in
compassion and still believed that they could be awoken from their apathetic
stupor.
By the middle of 1855, Dickens was keenly aware that indignant though the
public might be, it did not seem prepared to act upon its exasperation. The politics
of his articles became more and more overt, and he became less forgiving in his
attitude toward his readers. A series of pieces including 'Prince Bull. A Fairy
Tale' [17 February, 1855],'Gone to the Dogs' [10 March, 1855] and 'The Toady
Tree' [26 May, 1855] continued to confront readers with evidence of official
corruption and general unfitness in the government. Regarded as a series, the tone
of these articles is remarkable for the way the way it alters, becoming less and less
conciliatory to public sensitivity, seeking to shock the nation out of its inertia.
Perhaps the most intriguing pieces—for the purposes of this study, at least—are the
articles comprising the Thousand and One Humbugs' sequence, which appeared
between 21 April and 5 May, 1855. Whilst dwelling on the sumptuous and exotic
imagery associated with Turkey, the title was also a direct reference to the joke
made by de Redcliffe's secretary about the one thousand and one peace proposals
circulated by the Aberdeen administration.
The three articles take the form of one of Scheherezade's (or in this case
Hansardadade's—in a reference to the enormous tomes in which parliamentary
debates are, to this day, transcribed) stories of the fantastic. Dickens's strategy
here is to emphasize that the blunders he is describing defy belief and that the red
tape which inhibits action of any kind (whether electoral reform or the simple task
of unloading uniforms in Balaklava harbour) has reached such absurd proportions
as to have become almost mythical. Dickens adapts the story of Ali Baba and the
Forty Thieves to attack the nepotism that he saw was ruining the British
parliamentary system. Instead of uttering 'Open Sesame' in order to gain entrance
to their cave of sanctuary, the troop of robbers (or bureaucrats and politicians) utter
the words 'Debrett's Peerage' to be admitted to an enchanted cave marked with the
letters O.F.F.I.C.E. The pieces are extremely clever in their reworking of the
stories and make for an entertaining read, in spite of the rather predictable nature of
their humour. Given the adoption of the Orient to represent a system that defies
belief, it is of interest to jump forward to an article that appeared in All the Year
Round in 1861. 'The Adventures of Ali Mahmud' begins with a critique of what
Said would term 'orientalized' narratives as unrealistic. The piece interrogates the
way impressions of the East have been shaped by 'the wonderful collection of tales
which has given to the West its chief impressions of the East'. The story that
follows is essentially a morality tale transferred to an Eastern setting, although the
rather curious ending demonstrates the sheer scope of British trade and cultural
imperialism by depicting Ali Mahmud, the merchant of Tabriz, as one of the chief
Eastern importers of Manchester goods. The article captures superbly the almost
illusory qualities that the East seems to hold for Dickens and for many other
Victorians. Assertions such as, 'The East has been called the land of unbending
conservatism; but it is also the land of violent revolutions' are demonstrative of the
contradictory nature of the many pronouncements that are confidently made—but
with little supporting evidence—about the 'Orient'.30
There was, however, nothing remotely magical about the Condition of
England in the mid 1850s. So infuriated was Dickens at the appalling state of the
nation that, not for the first time, he allowed his campaign to prominently feature
in a novel, the most overtly political of all his works, Little Dorrit. The original
title, Nobody's Fault dwelt more explicitly on the widespread British
unwillingness to take responsibility for anything at all. As Dickens revealed in a
letter to his friend, the retired merchant, Captain E. E. Morgan, the Crimean
disaster was clearly the creative impetus behind the new novel:
You see what we have been doing to our valiant soldiers. You see what
miserable humbugs we are. And because we have got involved in meshes of
aristocratic red tape to our unspeakable confusion, loss and sorrow, the
gentlemen who have been so kind as to ruin us are going to give us a day of
humiliation and fasting the day after tomorrow. I am sick and sour to think of
such things at this age of the world...! am in the first stage of a new book,
which consists in going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage
go about and about his sugar before he touches it.31
Here we see Dickens laying out his plans for his satire on the Circumlocution
Office and the Tite Barnacles. He is particularly withering about the abuse of
hereditary privilege on the part of the aristocracy, and his preface to the first
edition of the novel draws attention to the importance he attached to the parody of
how not to govern:
If I might make an apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles and
the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of an
Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my having
done that violence to good manners, in the days of a Russian War, and of a
Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. [LDxvii]
Although his preface (dated May 1857) stresses the work's radicalism, the political
effect of reading Little Dorrit in novel form is muted by comparison with its
format when published in monthly instalments. When read in conjunction with the
weekly dose of scathing and openly critical articles such as "Nobody, Somebody
and Everybody' —a refrain that recurs frequently in the novel itself—administered
by Household Words, it would have been impossible for even the most obtuse
reader to miss Dickens's cries for reform. Little Dorrit appeared in monthly parts
between 1855 and 1857, published by Bradbury and Evans. While advocating that
the malefactors in the late war be taken to task Dickens explicitly identifies
'nobody' as 'everybody'. He observes:
The power of Nobody is becoming so enormous in England, and he alone is
responsible for so many proceedings, both in the way of commission and
omission; he has so much to answer for, and is so constantly called to account;
that a few remarks upon him may not be ill-timed.
The hand which this surprising person had in the late war is amazing to
consider. It was he who left the tents behind, who left the baggage behind,
who chose the worst possible ground for encampments, who provided no
means of transport, who killed the horses, who paralysed the comissariat, who
knew nothing of the business he professed to know andmonopolised, who
decimated the English army. It was Nobody who occasioned all the dire
confusion of Balaklava harbor, it was even Nobody who ordered the fatal
Balaklava cavalry charge. The non-relief of Kaps was the work of Nobody,
and Nobody has justly and severely suffered for that infamous
transaction...Wherever failure is accomplished, there Nobody lurks. With
success, he has nothing to do. That is Everybody's business, and all manner
of improbable people will invariably be found at the bottom of it. But, it is the
great feature of the present epoch that all public disaster in the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is assuredly, and to a dead certainty,
Nobody's work.32
The rhetoric here is remarkably similar to the 'Somebody, Nobody, Everybody'
passages in Little Dorrit and, as Chris Brooks argued, there is something
paradoxically empowering, but self-defeating about this complex mode of thought.
As Brooks remarked:
The semantic paradox.. .is irresolvable.. .The effect is to imbue the verbal stuff
of the novel with an analogue to the frustration and entrapment that are the
novel's theme. The construction 'being nothing' is a linguistic snare which
catches the reader between two mutually exclusive, but simultaneous,
propositions—to be and not to be. Positive and negative chase each other
round a verbal and semantic maze that is founded in ambiguity33.
The result, is of course, the type of bewildered stasis that results from being caught
between two such states, and which leads Arthur Clennam to avow repeatedly, *I
have no will'. [LD, 20]. The preface itself is particularly important in that it
demonstrates Dickens's refusal to imaginatively reconfigure the Crimean War in
its aftermath. Tennyson may have silently removed the phrase 'Someone had
blundered' from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' and have gone on to depict a
more glorious version of the war in Maud.34 The Crimean War Songbook may
have glossed over the scandal by consigning the facts to posterity, asserting:
Complaints were made of the most heart-rending description; yet everything,
no matter how terrible the privation was born by the allied forces with the
greatest patience. How far some are blameable for their forgetting our gallant
and devoted countrymen, our limits are too circumscribed to permit in this
brief account...Suffice it to say, that never was the British nation's generosity
so amply displayed in providing every comfort—nay even luxuries—for their
gallant and devoted heroes. [The fijture historian, when he treats of these
facts, will no doubt do every justice to the subject. To him we must leave it].35
Yet Dickens remained obstinate and sustained his anger at the chaos, incompetence
and refusal to accept liability, which he came increasingly to regard as evidence of
the inevitably fallen state of a humanity steeped in sin. Instead of dispersing, the
despair that Dickens felt lingered. Taut, disillusioned and furious as problem upon
problem accumulated, it is easy, retrospectively, to see that fury of these
proportions could only result in an explosion of temper or a breakdown. The
eruption was delayed until the end of 1857 when the sepoy rebels enabled him to
focus his vitriol; but when it came, Dickens's outburst was extremely violent and
remarkably public.
Notes
1 Henry Clifford. His Letters and Sketches from the Crimea. Introduction by General
Sir Bernard Paget. London: Michael Joseph. 1956. 124.
2 To Mrs Gaskell, 3 February, 1855. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume?. 521.
3 Leslie Stephen. Studies of A Biographer. Volume 2. London: Duckworth & Co, 1898.
236-7.
4 Quoted in Paul Kerr (ed.). The Crimean War. 1997. Basingstoke: Boxtree, 1998. 10.
5 Quoted in Alan Palmer. The Battle of the Banner: The Story of the Crimean War.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. 26.
6 See J. A. Froude. Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834-1881. (two
volumes). London: Longmans Green, 1919. Volume 2. 151 for an account of
Carlyle's distress at events in the Crimea.
7 To Mrs Gaskell. 31 July, 1854. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume?. 383.
8 [William Blanchard Jerrold] 'The Turk at Home', 4 March, 1854, 57-61 and [Eustace
Clare Grenville Murray] 'The Roving Englishman', 11 March, 1854, 79-80.
Household Words. Volume 9, numbers 206 & 207.
9 [Eliza Lynn] 'The True Story of the Nuns of Minsk'. Household Words. Volume 9,
number 216. 13 May, 1854. 291.
10 [Henry Morley] 'At Home with the Russians'. Household Words. Volume 10, number
252. 20 January, 1855. 533-538. Note that this piece would have been accepted for
publication before the revelations of The Times of late December 1854.
11 For more information on Dickens's relations with Sala see P.D. Edwards. Dickens's
'Young Men': George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian
Journalism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997.
12 [George Augustus Sala] 'Some Amenities of War'. Household Words. Volume 9,
number 225. 15 July, 1854. 523.
13 [Henry Morley] 'The Quiet Poor'. Household Words. Volume 9, number 212. 15
April, 1854. 201-206.
14 [Charles Dickens] 'It is not Generally Known'. Household Words. Volume 10,
number 232. 2 September, 1854. 49-52.
15 To the Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 1 November 1854. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume?. 454.
16 [Henry Morley]'A Home Question'. Household Words. Volume 10, number 242. 11
November 1854. 293-294.
17 [Charles Dickens] 'To Working Men'. Household Words. Volume 10, number 237. 7
October 1854. 169-170.
18 To Miss Burdett Coutts, 26 October, 1854. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 7.
443-444.
19 Kerr. The Crimean War. 93. This appliance is possibly the original for Daniel
Doyce's marvellous, but unspecified invention designed to aid his country in Little
Dorrit. Other candidates include Brunei's pre-fabricated self-assembly hospital, the
chef Alexis Soyer's portable stove, or Babbage's Difference Engine. Most sinisterly of
all, the machine could have been James Cowan's (note the similarity of the name to
that of another Little Dorrit character, Henry Go wan) 'steam-driven, four-wheeled,
armoured locomotive land battery fitted with scythes to mow down infantry', in which
Palmerston had expressed a keen interest [See Palmer. The Battle of the Banner, 180
for a full account of the prototype].
20 At the beginning of the war it took over two weeks for Russell's reports to reach
London by sea. However, when the telegraph between Balaklava and London was
finished in 1855, the delay was reduced to only forty-eight hours.
21 Edgar Johnson. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. Volume 2. Boston and
Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1952. 820-821.
22 See Trilling's introduction to Charles Dickens. Little Dorrit. 1855-7. The Oxford
Illustrated Dickens. Introduction by Lionel Trilling. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996. xiv.
23 See Chris Brooks. Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World.
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984, chapter five, for a discussion of public and
private world-building in Bleak House.
24 T. Longmore. The Sanitary Contrasts of the British and French Armies During the
Crimean War. London: Charles Griffin and company, 1883. 12.
25 The Times. 23 December 1854. 9.
26 K.J. Fielding. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. 201.
27 To W.H. Wills, 20 November, 1854. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 7. 471.
My brackets. See also To Frank Stone, 21 November, 1854: * My Dear Stone/1 send
you, as agreed, my little compliment to Lord Aberdeen. I expect to be made a Baronet,
about the middle of next week'. 471.
28 [Charles Dickens] "That Other Public'. Household Words. Volume 11, number 254. 3
February, 1855. 2.
29 [Charles Dickens] "That Other Public'. 3.
30 "The Adventures of Ali Mahmud'. All the Year Round. Volume 5, 258. 15 June,
1861. Ella Ann Oppenlander's helpful index of contributors does not, unfortunately,
identify the author of this piece.
31 To Captain E.E. Morgan [19 March] 1855. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 7.
571-2. Dickens was particularly irate at the imposition of a day of fasting and
humiliation on the labouring classes whose entire lives involved hunger and
deprivation. In addition, working men stood to lose a day's wages that they could ill
afford as a result of this thoughtless directive.
32 See [Charles Dickens] 'Nobody, Somebody and Everybody'. Household Words.
Volume 14, number 336. 30 August, 1856. 145-147.
33 Chris Brooks. Signs for the Times. 78.
34 Alan Palmer [The Banner of Battle, 167] describes how nine months after its original
publication the phrase was suppressed when the poem appeared in book form with
Maud.
35 The Crimean War Song Book of the Allies, With a Brief Account of the War to the Fall
of Sebastopol. London: A. Kirkaldy, 1855. 16.
Chapter 5
'How to Make an India Pickle'

'In effect, the grave, unhappy doubt which settles on my mind is, whether India is
the better for our rule, so far as regards the social condition of the great mass of
the people. We have put down widow-burning, we have sought to check
infanticide, but I have travelled hundreds of miles through a country peopled with
beggars and covered with wigwam villages'.'
'It is not saying much, perhaps, but there are few countries and few histories
about which the British know less than they do about India'. The Times, 17
September 1857.2
Known today as the first Indian War of Independence, the "Indian Mutiny' or
'Sepoy Rebellion' is widely regarded as a turning point in nineteenth-century
Anglo-Indian relations. The uprising was far from an isolated incident and
stemmed from a growing lack of understanding of Indian religion on the part of the
increasingly culturally distant British. The East India Company, a private trading
concern originally formed in 1600, had gradually conquered India changing, in the
process, from a purely commercial venture to a governing body as it sought to
protect existing commercial interests by annexing ever more territory. In 1784 the
India Act was passed, establishing a ruling partnership between the Company and
British government to rule India, thus formalizing the Company's altered role.
Having lost its monopoly over Indian trade in 1813, the East India Company's rule
over India was consolidated in 1833 when the Company was instructed to cease its
commercial business and was compensated with an annual payment of £630,000 to
be derived from Indian territorial revenues. In spite of growing evidence of abuses
and exploitation, this arrangement continued until 1858, when it was dissolved in
direct response to the rebellion.
The fact that Victorian Britain was so badly traumatized by the Mutiny seems,
retrospectively, to be something of an anomaly. The history of India since Clive's
victory at Plassey in 1757 had been a turbulent one, and revolts against British
rule, or more accurately, the expansionist policies of the East India Company, were
hardly rare occurrences.3 Some of the better known uprisings included those of
1764 when mutineers were blown from guns, 1782 when three corps in Bengal
rebelled against foreign service for fear that they would break their caste through
going to sea, and 1843, when the British Residency at Scinde was attacked.4 H.B.
Henderson, a junior officer in the Bengal army observed with remarkable clarity of
vision in 1829, 'Orators, we know, love to call British India, 'the Empire of
opinion'; but it is the EMPIRE OF SEPOYS: and woe to its rulers, when they shall
venture to neglect this main spring, this too critical secret of its mechanism'.5
Indeed, throughout the 1840s General Sir Charles Napier (who had until his
resignation in 1847 been responsible for the conquest and annexation of vast areas
of the Indian territories such as Scinde) warned of the potential for mutiny within
the sepoy ranks.
In February 1857 the Enfield rifle was introduced to the Bengal Army; in
order to load the rifle, soldiers had to bite the paper end of a greased cartridge and
then ram the bullet into the gun's muzzle. Rumours that the cartridges were
greased with pork and beef fat (the pig constituting an abomination to those of the
Muslim faith and the cow being sacred to Hindus) began to circulate. The troops
rebelled against this assault on their religion and, although their uprising was soon
suppressed, the cartridges were eventually withdrawn from use. The incident
tapped into broader fears relating to the contamination of food, the breaking of
caste and the defilement of religion. Changes like the Abolition of Sati Act (1829),
which attempted to outlaw the practice of widow-burning, or the Hindu Widow
Re-marriage Act (1856), along with increased missionary activity generated
concerns that the Company would pursue a policy of compulsory Christianization
across the subcontinent. By May 1857 rumours and anxiety had spread across
India and eighty-five sepoys at Meerut (a sizeable garrison town near Delhi) were
court-martialled and publicly humiliated for their refusal to use the Enfield rifle.
Their comrades retaliated by freeing the offenders, killing the Europeans in the
community and breaking into the garrison's arsenal. A wider rebellion erupted,
particularly across the North of India, which took nearly two years for the British
to suppress and although the revolt originated within the Indian army, it soon
spread to the civilian population.
One of the most famous, or notorious, incidents of the revolt was the
Cawnpore Massacre and it is this event that caused widespread public outrage in
Britain and which distinguished the Mutiny from other insurrections. The city of
Cawnpore had been under siege for three weeks by June 1857 and Dhundu Pant,
known as Nana Sahib, the adopted son of a local peshwa (hereditary prime
minister), offered safe passage to its four hundred residents after the British
surrendered owing to a lack of water. Having had his hereditary stipend removed
by the British, Nana Sahib certainly had reasons to sympathize with the mutineers.
It would seem that he was threatened by local rebels as, having assured the British
party safe passage down the Ganges, an ambush was launched and all but three of
the men in the group were killed. These three survivors were later shot, and the
remaining women and children (approximately two hundred in number) soon
became hostages in a summer palace known as the Bibighar, as British forces
advanced towards Cawnpore from Allahabad. A number of the prisoners died of
cholera, dysentery and malnutrition during their captivity, and as news of British
reprisals spread, the captors were incited to kill their female hostages. The women
were allegedly violated before being hacked to death along with the children,
leaving the walls of the Bibighar smeared in blood from the struggle. Attempts
were then made to conceal what had taken place, with the maimed corpses being
hurled down a nearby well. British reprisals were swift and horrific, with
malefactors being forced to break caste by licking the walls of the Bibighar clean,
'How to Make an India Pickle' 93
before being blasted from the mouths of cannon. The atrocities committed at
Cawnpore, both real and imagined, shocked and outraged the British public and
were invoked to justify a broader vengeance against all Indian rebels. Dickens was
certainly one of the more vocal advocates of wholesale revenge during the early
days of the turbulence.
The East India Company's hold on India was maintained largely by a native
army, and Napier's warning of the prospect of rebellion should have caused
widespread alarm. It remained unheeded, however, even though the ratio of
British soldiers to Indian troops was by 1856, less than one to six.6 The actual
figures involved seem even more remarkable when we realize that a population of
200 million was kept in order by a native force of 200,000, which was in turn
answerable to an English military presence of just 40,000 men. The signs of the
rebellion were there for those who wished to see them, yet as Harriet Martineau
observed in October 1857:
Hardly one in a thousand of the Company's officers in India has at all
anticipated the sort of revolution that would be induced by subjecting India to
the conditions of European life in the nineteenth century. Hardly one in a
hundred has seen what was going on before his eyes, or reasoned on what
amused his observation or interested his understanding.7
Such blind complacency stemmed from both a lack of empathy with Indian
grievances and an implicit belief in the native's fundamental loyalty. At the height
of the unrest, when the Mutiny was raging across Northern India, it was
extraordinarily difficult to convince officers that 'their' sepoys—whom they
seemed to look upon as obedient children—would join the revolt. Punch would
later claim in its facetious 'How to Make an Indian Pickle', that a combination of
'official sauce' and 'native superstition' had been allowed to ferment for too long,
and that a large degree of the blame for the uprising resulted from a short-sighted
failure to take the signs of native unrest seriously.8
The British in India believed firmly that they understood both the psyche and
the needs of the indigenous population. While the Africans could be largely
dismissed as an inferior and savage race to be slowly civilized by the likes of Mrs
Jellyby, the Indian people were, before the Mutiny, regarded in a very different
light. From the earliest days of the Company's involvement in the East Indies in
the seventeenth century, until the early decades of the nineteenth century, neither
European women nor missionaries were considered welcome in India.
Missionaries had been actively discouraged by the Company, and there were few
in India before the removal of the trading monopoly in 1813. Owing to the
hardships of the long journey and the relentless heat of the climate, India would not
have been an alluring prospect for many women. However, as journey times were
expedited by inventions such as the steam ship, women began to accompany their
husbands, and India became a destination for unmarried women in search of a
spouse. This absence of Western women had in the past meant that a large
number of Company employees and troops in the Indian army had taken Indian
wives or concubines and as a consequence enjoyed a greater understanding of
Indian cultures and religions. According to Jane Robinson it was estimated that
ninety per cent of British men in India had married Indian or Eurasian women by
the middle of the eighteenth century.9 However, once the European women began
to arrive, inter-racial unions were increasingly frowned upon and as a result of this
measure more pronounced divisions between the British and the Indians began to
appear. Patrick Brantlinger has rightly drawn attention to the importance of a
growing emphasis on Britain's trusteeship over India, which arose as the East India
Company's trading concerns were scaled down by the passage of the 1784 India
Act. The writer and East Indian stock-holder Edmund Burke, who had been so
instrumental in emancipating India from the Company's endless annexations and
plunderings was particularly concerned with stressing the idea of a trust and in
involving the British government in Indian affairs to a far greater degree than ever
before. As Brantlinger has noted:
From the late 1700s to its demise in 1858, the East India Company was in
effect one arm of a dual control over India; the home government was the
other. By the time the company ceased to function as a trading concern in
1833, the idea had become paramount that Britain had acquired a special trust
or obligation for civilizing India.10
It would, of course, be naive to suggest that racism was not rife in pre-Mutiny
India. However, the interrelations between Britons and Indians were based on a
type of mutual respect, which conceded that India could, with time and assistance,
be raised from its feudalistic backwardness to rank alongside the mother country!
The reactionary stance taken by a number of eminent Victorians would
suggest that the uprising came as a bolt from the blue, although as Garrett Ziegler
has suggested, responses were 'complicated not only by distance but by
misinformation'.11 Brigadier John Nicholson, who commanded the assault on
Delhi, asserted ferociously:
Let us propose a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement or burning of the
murderers of the women and children at Delhi. The idea of simply hanging
the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening. I wish that I were in that part
of the world that if necessary I might take the law into my own hands'.12
At the height of his own outrage, Dickens exclaimed somewhat hysterically:
I wish I were Commander in Chief over there! I would address that Oriental
character which must be powerfully spoken to, in something like the following
placard, which should be vigorously translated into all native dialects, 'I, The
Inimitable, holding this office of mine, and firmly believing that I hold it by
the permission of Heaven and not by the appointment of Satan, have the honor
to inform you Hindoo gentry that it is my intention, with all possible
avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution,
to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth
with the late abominable atrocities.13
Dickens's tone in this outburst is certainly difficult to reconcile with that of the
author of A Christmas Carol. His statements here are unequivocally furious and
akin to some of the more draconian pronouncements made in his "Noble Savage'
essay, although here the possibility of irony cannot be admitted. The above extract
is of the type cited all too frequently by critics like William Oddie and Patrick
Brantlinger, both of whom present rather manichean readings of Dickens's

response to the Mutiny.14 Oddie's article was certainly groundbreaking in its
reading of A Tale of Two Cities as an allegory for the events in India and an
extension of the sentiments expressed in the Mutiny story Dickens penned with
Wilkie Collins, 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners'. However, it falls short in
that it focuses only on a limited range of material from 1857-9 and neglects the
wealth of pre-Mutiny Indian articles that appeared in Household Words from its
inception. Brantlinger, who acknowledges his debt to Oddie's work, also
concentrates largely on A Tale of Two Cities along with the short story written in
collaboration with Wilkie Collins for Christmas 1857, 'The Perils of Certain
English Prisoners'. He argues that Dickens's initial, heated reactions to the sepoy
rebellion are a logical consequence of an ingrained racism manifested in 'The
Noble Savage' and a growing impatience with the Tite Barnacles who governed
Britain. Convincing though Brantlinger's argument may appear on the surface,
Dickens's stance on the uprising is far less clearly defined.
In the Mutiny's aftermath opinions relating to an inherent refinement,
distinguishing the Indian from the African were discarded. In a matter of months
the conception of the Indian people as a gentle and indolent race had been radically
transformed to what Sander L. Oilman describes as a state of ignoble savagery.15
Suddenly the Indians were re-imagined as violent, ruthless and highly dangerous.
The possibility of India ever attaining Western standards of civilization was swiftly
abandoned. The territory was now looked upon as a colony to be ruled, not simply
governed, and the colonization process was increasingly formalized after the
complete abolition of the East India Company in 1858. The logical conclusion to
this policy was Queen Victoria's investiture as Empress of India in 1877, a title
seeming to hark back to the more despotic Mughal dynasty. Dickens had little to
say on the subject of North Africa, and was more concerned with what he
considered to be the misplaced efforts of missionaries in the hitherto unexplored
regions of the continent, which were, to his mind, completely separate from the
comparatively civilized Egypt, Arabia and India. As late as February 1857 he
made a clear differentiation between the colonial holdings:
Without at all disparaging Dr Livingstone or in the least doubting his facts, I
think however that all his deductions must be received with great caution. The
history of all African effort, hitherto, is a history of wasted European life,
squandered European money, and blighted European hope—in which the
generous English have borne a great share. That it would be a great thing to
cultivate that cotton and be independant [sic] of America, no one can doubt;
but I think that the happy end, with all its attendant good results, must be
sought in India. There are two tremendous obstacles in Africa; one, the
climate, the other, the people.16
It is bitterly ironic that the 'happy end' that Dickens saw in India was, just three
months later, to be dispelled forever. It is also noticeable that while his sweepingly
generalized comments negate the Africans, he does not similarly disparage the
Indian people. At this stage, then, far from being a den of dangerous saboteurs,
India seemed to Dickens to offer economic hope to Britain in the event of a
disruption of American supplies. This view was to be challenged as the Mutiny

unfolded, although he was to return to it once again in the 1860s.
Although the subject of multitudinous parliamentary debates, India had
remained rather a mystery to the public at large until the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The subcontinent was largely a backdrop to the national prosperity, and in literary
terms it was unusual for India to figure as anything more than a source of wealth
for bourgeois characters like Thackeray's Newcomes or Dickens's Mr Dombey.
Having worked as a parliamentary reporter for both the True Sun and the Mirror of
Parliament in the early 1830s, Dickens would undoubtedly have been privy to the
debates surrounding the abolition of the East India Company's commercial
monopoly. Indeed, a survey of Dickens's earliest Anglo-Indian protagonists would
almost seem to make a case for withdrawal from India by itself, as the subcontinent
is figured as a waste ground for those who cannot succeed at home. The carousing
medical students of The Pickwick Papers Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen remove to
Bengal after their practice in Bristol fails. Both Miss Betsey Trotwood's violent
husband and the profligate wastrel Jack Maldon are conveniently—if not
permanently—banished in David Copperfield, while the sole representative of the
Indian army is the violent and cruel Major Bagstock of Dombey and Son.
However, it is the once fair fascinator Julia Mills who draws attention to the
Company's accumulative impulses when she returns to Britain transformed into a
crotchety and spoilt memsahib:
[P]eevish and fine, with a black man to carry cards and letters to her on a
golden salver, and a copper-coloured woman in linen, with a bright
handkerchief round her head, to serve her Tiffin in her dressing-room. But
Julia keeps no diary in these days; never sings Affection's Dirge...Julia is
steeped in money to the throat, and talks and thinks of nothing else. [DC 875]
Of course, Miss Mills's role within the novel is decidedly not to draw attention to
British trading concerns in the East Indies, thus she is a prime example of the part
India played in the bulk of British fiction before 1851.17 She demonstrates that for
Dickens, even in 1850, the colonies remained little more than useful places to
which characters—or problem children—could plausibly disappear to amass
wealth rapidly. As Goldie Morgentaler has astutely commented 'Money
underscores the real value of exotic countries and their inhabitants—they exist to
be exploited. Whether that exploitation takes the crass form of the romantic
fantasies of young girls or the crass commercialism of imperial powers makes very
little difference'.18 Certainly, her experiences in India seem to have tainted Julia
Mills, and the memsahib's life of idleness totally quells the passionate imagination
of her girlhood. At this stage of his career, however, Dickens was certainly not
concerned with challenging the frequently exploitative means by which these
riches were accrued, and the lives of Julia's entourage of servants remain even
more mysterious than that of Major Bagstock's enigmatically silent 'Native'. The
Empire remained decidedly 'off stage', and Dickens's imagination was not
stimulated by its otherness.
The spectacle at the Crystal Palace in 1851, however, brought India to public
attention, promoting interest in the East, publicizing the technological
achievements of the East India Company, and putting forward an opulent, fruitful
India rich in the grains and cereals on show at the Palace, and rather at odds with
the frequent starvation experienced by the Indian peasantry. The extraordinary
impact of the display is evidenced by John Foley's sculpture, Asia, positioned on
one of the outer corners of the Albert Memorial's plinth to commemorate the
Prince Consort's role in organizing the Great Exhibition. The central figure of a
voluptuous-looking woman sitting astride an elephant and unveiling herself is a
direct reference to the forum the Crystal Palace offered for a display of India's
hitherto unknown art and manufactures.19 The Exhibition undoubtedly offered a
showcase for India to reveal herself to the world, giving the E.I.C. 30,000 square
feet—an area significantly larger than that assigned to any other colony or
dominion—in which to interest the public in the expanding, and costly, holding.
The Catalogue to the Exhibition described the India section in suitably epic terms:
India, vast in extent and diversified in surface, is remarkable as the cradle of
one, at least, of the nations who earliest practised the arts and cultivated the
sciences which characterize civilization, and from whence these travelled to
the West, and, perhaps, also to the East. Its present inhabitants continue to
venerate sciences which they know only by name, and practise arts of which
they know not the principles; and this with a skill not only remarkable for the
early period at which it attained perfection, but also for the manner in which it
has remained stationary for so many ages. But when Commerce was in its
infancy, or dealt only in the most precious commodities, these arts could not
have been practised unless India had contained within itself all the raw
materials which Art could convert into useful or elegant ornaments.20
The tone here is typical of responses elicited by the Indian section and encapsulates
the pervasive half-contemptuous, half-admiring attitude towards the subcontinent.
The writer is clearly impressed by the enormous and heterogeneous holding, but
seeks to legitimize British intervention by suggesting that India had reached the
pinnacle of civilization she was capable of achieving alone several generations
back and had subsequently failed to develop any further. Whilst it assumes the
tone of an anthropological survey, the catalogue demonstrates an appreciation of
Indian trading traditions when it comments:
The preceding enumeration of the articles in the Indian department of the
Great Exhibition proves beyond doubt that India not only possesses a vast
variety of raw materials, but it is able to work them up into articles for daily
use or for display on occasions of ceremony or festivals, either of a religious
or domestic nature. History informs us that India has from the earliest periods
been distinguished for the richness of its natural products and for the elegance
of its manufactured fabrics, also that an active commerce was established with
Persia and Egypt... 21
It does acknowledge the educational role of the exhibition when it points out that,
'in spite of books, and pictures, and panoramas, [India] is scarcely better known to
a very large part of our educated public, except as a land of elephants, tigers,
cobra-di-capellos, shawls and diamonds'.22 However, this orientalized version of
India is replaced by an equally homogeneous reading, treating the vast territory as

one enormous British trade outlet and woefully neglecting regional diversity:
Why this people have made so little progress, why the great bulk of them are
in the same condition, moral, social, and intellectual, that they were in 300
years ago, is a question too large to be discussed here; but we may venture to
point out certain obvious reasons. The first is to be found in the narrowness of
their wants. Look at the army of little figures, modelled from life,
representing various trades and callings, chiefly in Bengal, which are exhibited
in the north bay of the Indian collection, and observe how little these people
need, how few are their incentives to exertion.23
The 1LN seems almost to be echoing Dickens's Mrs Chick in its pronouncement
that the Indian people have failed to "make an effort', and its recognition of the
heavy British involvement in a large part of the wares on show. The inert display
figures are read as representatives of a wider Indian passivity and languor, fully
legitimizing their subordination to the E.I.C. The paper pays scant attention to the
plethora of native beads, fabrics, furniture, musical instruments and other
traditional Indian goods on display, preferring to focus upon their 'stasis'.
The very fact that the Indian people have been reduced to an inert 'army of
little figures' who are seen to have few needs is illustrative of the discrepancies
between the image promoted by the Company and the reality which all too often
involved starvation and exorbitant taxes. While the 1LN is merely aghast at India's
stasis, the Exhibition Catalogue is generally more respectful towards the territory's
past and acknowledges her key role in disseminating knowledge across the globe.
India's heritage is treated with the same reverence that would accompany a
discussion of the ancient Greeks, and this respect for the dominion's past marks a
fundamental difference between nineteenth-century attitudes toward India and
Africa.24 However, the Official Catalogue could not resist describing the figures
and testifying to their verisimilitude either:
The appearance of the inhabitants of many parts of India is admirably rendered
in the series of figures exhibited from different parts of India. The soft and
delicate-limbed Bengallee is well represented...the tall and slender inhabitant
of Southern India...But that all are not so effeminate-looking may be seen in
the model of the Jummabundi, where all the castes of the Dekkan are shown,
as also in the well-clothed inhabitants from Belgaum and North-West India,
and of Thugs in the model exhibited by Captain Reynolds.25
Here the focus is upon the frailty of the Indian form, as sweeping generalizations
are offered regarding regional physiques. Those defying the soft elegance of the
'Bengallee' are described in negatives that make them not masculine, but rather
'no so feminine' as their Southern counterparts. Both descriptions are complicit in
constructing a vision of the Indians as indolent and effete—a race of long-
conquered, submissive people, too lethargic to disrupt the status quo.
The Catalogue provided a glossary of both Indian and Anglo-Indian exhibits
that ran into many, many pages. Lara Kriegel has noted the important role of the
guidebook in shaping public responses to the display, commenting that: 'By
narrating India for the British public the Exhibition's texts domesticated the
subcontinent'.26 Coverage of the Exhibition certainly suggests that the public needed
some guidance in its reactions to the novel India display [see Figure 5.1] and, at the
very least, some contextual knowledge. The ILN reinforces the difference and total
otherness of the subcontinent, admitting somewhat perplexedly, 'Although in the
British department, we have a right to treat [the Indian exhibition] as foreign,
because nine-tenths of the contents will be new to nine-tenths of the visitors'.27 The
juxtaposition of the East India Company's impressive machinery with traditional
Indian wares was certainly a striking one, emphasizing European progress, whilst
playing on stereotypes of Eastern exoticism. This contrast provided a justification
for continued Company intervention, presenting India as a civilization in decline and
therefore, by implication, in need of Western 'assistance'. Kriegel has encapsulated
the commercial agenda behind the organization of the exhibits, observing:
'Exhibition writers constructed India as a museum—its crafts consigned to the past
and their merits made unattainable by modern, Western habits of production'.28 The
classification of 'primitive' Indian tools as 'rude in appearance and simple in
construction' contrasted with the E.LC.'s modern machinery, whilst the display of
hookahs and hookah snakes as specimens of Indian wares promoted a sense of
Eastern decadence and abandon. Ornate Indian armour and weaponry were
presented as curiosities, and descriptive materials highlighted their ornamental
qualities, rather than their utility:
In the collection of Arms we have a curious display of what would seem to be
drawn from a museum, storing the productions of various ages, but which are
actually the arms in present use in different parts of India.30
Through concentrating on their strangeness and antiquity, the author strips the
weapons of their danger, failing to question why they might need to be used in
present-day India and certainly not considering that they could be deployed against
the British. No space is given to the long history of resistance against British rule in
which some of these weapons might have been deployed; instead the subcontinent is
turned into one enormous spectacle to be marvelled at.
The Great Exhibition certainly generated an unprecedented level of interest in
India, but the perception of the Indians as languid and inert became a widespread
accepted truth. Punch in a long poem, 'The Last Night in the Crystal Palace', wrote
of how, 'India show'd with a lazy grace,/From shawls and muslins, a dusky
faceyLarge eyes half of languor and half of light,/And a brow that blazed with the
Koh-I-Noor's light', an image that disregards nearly a hundred years of resistance to
British rule in its portrayal of India's passivity.31 The eroticism of this portrayal
clearly anticipates the twentieth-century analogies of writers like E.M. Forster and
Paul Scott, both of whom envisaged India as a female body, repeatedly raped and
pillaged by the British.32 The quest to understand India was hardly a new one, but it
was bound inextricably to the British grasp on power. In 1784 the Governor-
General, Warren Hastings and the renowned Orientalist Sir William Jones had
founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal in Calcutta. The group modelled itself on the
English Royal Society and its members devoted themselves to the study of,
'Indian tongue, history, science, mathematics, zoology and meteorology'.33 The
5.1 Detail form The Illustrated London News Grand Diorama of the Great
Exhibition.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
'Haw to Make an India Pickle' 101
society seems to have been insatiable in its pursuit of knowledge concerning Indian
botany, folklore, history, languages, legal codes, mythology and sacred literature.
Hastings' aim was to reconcile English leadership with Indian tradition, showing
respect for, and disseminating knowledge about, local customs and religions and,
wherever possible, existing laws. This pursuit of knowledge about India and a
complete understanding of its ways was certainly bound to the British grasp on
power and it was increasingly believed that if the other could be understood and
taxonomized, then it could also be controlled. However, many of the men
involved in these ventures felt a genuine respect and fascination for the country
and its people. As John Keay has pointed out in his magisterial study of India:
[TJheir scholarship sometimes slipped into active championship of the peoples
and dynasts whom they studied, and their histories naturally made a strong
case for British intervention.34
The examples of civil servants and military men devoting their careers to the study
of Indian culture are numerous. Indeed, the historian Mountstuart Elphinstone,
famous for his study of Indian customs and manners and his History of India
(1839), actually declined the post of Governor-General so that he could
concentrate on his Indian scholarship. This culture of administrative tolerance and
understanding persisted during the early years of the nineteenth century, although
the presence of Christian missionaries had altered this approach by the 1850s. In
1800 the antiquary and topographer, Major Colin Mackenzie of the Madras
Engineers, had crossed Mysore to catalogue its human and natural resources,
William Hodges (1744-1797) travelled across India under the patronage of Warren
Hastings, painting Indian landscapes, whilst Tilly Kettle (1735-1786) painted
Indian people and customs, including sati. Furthermore, in 1817 the philosopher
and political economist James Mill (1773-1836) had published his nine-volume
History of British India. Mill's conclusions seem to have played a major role in
forming perceptions of India back in Britain, as is evidenced by the parallels
between his writings and the conclusions drawn by the journalists of 1851. He
makes a number of sweeping judgments on the Indian character, which are
completely heedless of the country's ethnic and cultural diversity. Most notably he
represents India as stuck in the past and hindered from future progress by a mixture
of tradition and superstition. Mill also falls into the Western trap of drawing
comparisons between the mother country and her colony, with Britain yet again
representing a criterion of civilized achievement, which India was too lethargic and
backward to even dream of emulating. The Great Exhibition, then, was not simply
a cornucopia of exotic fare, but rather, it joined a tradition of attempting to define
and understand India, which dated from the East India Company's earliest forays
into the subcontinent.
The need to read and decode India is perhaps best explained by Edward Said's
theory of Orientalism. Robert Young encapsulates Said's argument succinctly
when he observes:
Orientalism argues that a complex set of representations was fabricated which
for the West effectively became 'the Orient' and determined its understanding
of it, as well as providing the basis for its subsequent self-appointed
imperialist rule. Disclosing a closely interrelated web of writings that stretch

from literary, historical, scholarly accounts to political, military and
imperialist administrative ones, Said suggests that the former produced the
Orient for the eventual appropriation by the latter.35
It is apparent that along with its promotion of India, the Great Exhibition also
indirectly created a single Indian discourse whereby the British did not simply
interpret their colony, but also manufactured and disseminated a series of meanings
for it. What Iris M. Zavala describes as a monologic discourse had been created
which pre-determined how India would be presented to the world, and hence how
she would be perceived. As Zavala explains:
Literally, then, colonial monologic discourses are 'cannibalistic', devouring all
images, offering closely chosen bits of information, displaying certain things
and hiding others. These repudiations of 'imaginary identities' are not
referential or mimetic, they are coded, and deploy a "politics of language'. In
the inscription of the Other's body and voice, what comes to light is the
partiality that passes for a fixed and universal image.36
In short, an Indian meta-narrative had been constructed, whereby the very act of
producing an Indian exhibition suggested that there existed a single tangible India
that one would be able to comprehend once one had viewed the display. It is
perhaps for this reason that the public was so shocked by the events of 1857-8.
For the crowds who flocked to the Crystal Palace, the India section became a
firm favourite and a spectacle to be consumed. Indeed, in spite of the ILN*s
assertions to the contrary, images such as the Koh-I-Noor—the largest diamond in
the world and the inspiration behind Collins's The Moonstone—or the Elephant
and bejewelled Howdah displayed by Queen Victoria are likely to have captured
the visitors' imaginations rather more than the specimens of machinery put forward
by the Company. The Master of Trinity College, William Whewell drew attention
to the pervasiveness of the fiction of a sumptuous orient in a lecture to inaugurate a
series of talks on the Great Exhibition:
Even still, the tissues and ornamental works of Persia and of India have
beauties which we, with all our appliances and means, cannot surpass. The
gorgeous East showers its barbaric pearl and gold into its magnificent textures.
But is there really anything barbaric in the skill and taste which they display?
Does the Oriental prince or monarch, even if he confine his magnificence to
native manufactures, present himself to the eyes of his slaves in a less splendid
or less elegant attire than the nobles and the sovereigns of this our Western
world, more highly civilized as we nevertheless deem it? Few persons, I
think, would answer in the affirmative. The silks and shawls, the embroidery
and jewellery, the moulding and carving, which those countries can produce,
and which decorate their palaces and their dwellers in palaces, are even now
such as we cannot excel. Oriental magnificence is still a proverbial mode of
describing a degree of splendour and artistical richness which is not found
among ourselves.37
Whewell's description here is lavish in the extreme, and it is evident that the
elaborate and munificent displays at the Crystal Palace appealed to his
imagination. His repeated use of the word 'barbaric' is particularly pertinent,

given the dual connotations of otherness (the word 'barbarian' in ancient Greece
referred to an outsider) and savagery that the word invokes. Whewell finds the
otherness of the display highly attractive, but given the fact that it was managed by
the E.I.C. the second meaning of his question about the savagery of skill and taste
is somewhat spurious. Unwittingly, then, the Great Exhibition both perpetuated
and advanced the perception of a single unified and exotic India, bearing little
relation to the disparate reality.
According to Guy Debord, 'The concept of "spectacle" unifies and explains a
great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are
appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must
itself be recognized'.38 The East India Company had compiled a display of Indian
goods to promote the image it wanted to project to the world. The scope for
interpretation by the unfamiliar spectator was as a consequence severely limited. It
was impossible for the viewer to read between the lines and detect the suppression
of traditional Indian life that had become a more marked feature of the E.I.C's rule
in recent years. Equally, it was impossible for the Exhibition's organizers to even
suspect that the display to promote peace had been used as a forum to project a
vision of prosperity and progress that was an illusion to all except the Company's
shareholders. As Debord continues:
The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of
the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all
the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself,
where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most
archaic...The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about
itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of
its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.39
For the public who visited the display there was no scope to argue with the image
being promoted. The average man or woman knew little about India aside from
newspaper reports on the Company's exploits. Their knowledge of the East would
have been tempered by the same discourse of an opulent and exotic Orient that
informed Whewell's lecture. The splendid and prosperous India on show—this
self-portrait of the hegemonic E.I.C.—was the only India available to the public,
and it was certainly impressed with what it saw.
Part of the interest in the subcontinent was indubitably connected to a growing
sense of national achievement and self worth and increasingly, possession of India
became linked to a sense of imperial identity. As early as 1836, King William IV
observed, 'Now this is a fine country, but it is nothing without its colonial
possession, especially India'.40 Notwithstanding this pride, India was not the
immense source of wealth that it was commonly believed to be, but actually
constituted a substantial drain on the nation's coffers. Marx and Engels asserted
rather perplexedly in 1857:
The present state of affairs in Asia suggests the inquiry, What is the real value
of their Indian dominion to the British nation and people? Directly, that is in
the shape of tribute, or surplus of Indian receipts over Indian expenditure,
nothing whatever reaches the British Treasury. On the contrary, the annual
outgo is very large. From the moment that the East India Company entered
extensively on the career of the conquest...their finances fell into an
embarrassed condition, and they were repeatedly compelled to apply to
Parliament, not only for military aid to assist them in holding the conquered
territories, but for financial aid to save them from bankruptcy.
They go on to point out that the East India Company's debts amounted to
£50,000,000 in the year of the Mutiny and that the British government also bore
the cost of transporting the Indian army. The myth of Indian opulence was largely
sustained by wealthy individuals, or nabobs, who had made fortunes in India and
then returned home. Admittedly, their capital was often then invested in domestic
business concerns, but not on a scale to justify such a large expenditure of the tax-
payer's money.42 In reality, the subcontinent was an expensive liability, with an
increasingly symbolic rather than pecuniary value. As Samuel Warren expressed it
in The Lily and the Bee, India was 'distant, dazzling, vast—/The coveted of
conquering Potentates, in old and modern time; but by Heaven assigned, to
England'.
Although undoubtedly bewildered by the Great Exhibition, Dickens became
increasingly interested in India in the 1850s. Part of his curiosity may be attributed
to the fact that his son, Walter—whose career as a cadet in the East Indian army
was decided upon by his father when the boy was only eight years old—had
recently completed his training at Addiscombe and set sail for India on 20 July
1857. Although his original regiment the 26th Regiment of Bengal Infantry had
been disbanded by the time he reached India, Walter was to fight at both Cawnpore
and Lucknow during the uprising as a member of the 42nd Highlanders. The
decision to despatch him to the subcontinent is a classic example of the use of the
colonies as a place to get rid of troublesome younger sons. Dickens's
correspondence of the early 1850s often lamented Walter's 'slowness' and
suggested that he was fit only for military service. In fact though, Walter's brief
career was a distinguished one and his Mutiny service resulted in accelerated
promotion to lieutenant before he was eighteen years old. Unusually, he was
enrolled for lessons in Hindustani before his departure, and he also received
instruction—arranged by Miss Courts—in the art of photography. Evidently,
Walter was to have engaged in the efforts to document the East. In 1863 Frank
Dickens was also shipped out to India (as it happened he arrived just as Walter
died) to join the Bengal Mounted Police.
Family interests aside, the sudden rise in numbers of articles on India
appearing in Household Words earlier in the 1850s, particularly between 1851 and
1852, would suggest that the widespread interest stimulated by the India display
was also a significant factor.45 Although Dickens did not himself contribute a
piece relating to India until December 1857 when 'The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners' appeared, the strict editorial control he notoriously exercised over all
submissions points to a growing interest in the colony. As he wrote to Mrs Gaskell
in January 1850:
No writer's name will be used—neither my own, nor any others—every paper

will be published without any signature; and all will seem to express the
general mind and purpose of the Journal, which is the raising up of those that
are down, and the general improvement of our social condition.
It is the pledge to raise up those who are down which is the other key reason
behind Dickens's and Household Words'* entrance into the India debate. A
number of the pamphlets that responded to American Notes in the early 1840s had
drawn attention to the inconsistency between Britain's call for the abolition of
slavery and the aggressive expansionist policies of the East India Company. As
the respondent to American Notes 'Quarles Quickens' contended:
It is certainly a political anomaly that, while England has at such heavy
sacrifices attempted to assert the rights of the African race, the voice of
humanity should not have reached her from the East...I allude to the suffering
millions in British India, trodden down and oppressed by British avarice; I
allude to the oceans of blood which she has shed in that unhappy country; to
the unjust and remorseless war, which she has urged against a weak and timid
race; to the slave trade itself, as it exists where her influence is paramount.47
Dickens may not have addressed the India question when he attacked North
American slavery. However, with the growing disillusionment he began to express
more forcibly in the 1850s, he became increasingly critical of any institution
responsible for spreading misery anywhere; whether it was the appalling sanitary
conditions of London or the rack-renting of the East Indian peasantry.
The Household Words view of India was rather less romanticized than that of
William Whewell and in the early 1850s the journal seemed to be deliberately
reading against the grain of the Exhibition, perhaps as a consequence of its
conductor's disdain for the spectacle. An article of 1852 by John Capper, 'The
Peasants of British India' goes so far as to demonstrate an awareness of the
Western propensity to contain the East by orientalizing it. Capper was a former
manager of a coffee planation, who had lived in Ceylon from around 1836. He
was a correspondent for The Times and seems to have edited a number of local
publications, including the Emigrant's Journal and the Ceylon Examiner. 'The
Peasants of British India' begins by considering the role played by the West in
creating an Indian mystique:
The annals of our kingdom in the East have been written in blood with a pen
of gold. They read very like stories from the Arabian Nights Entertainments;
and thus many people indulge in the belief that, in India, the population is
exclusively composed of caliphs, nabobs, jugglers, rajahs, bankers, fakeers,
nautch girls, Bramin priests, dacoits, and magicians.48
This history penned in blood encapsulates the sinister agenda of the orientalist
process. The atrocities committed by the East India Company's revenue collectors
are obscured by the construction of a magical East, an image all too appealing to
the imagination and hence easily disseminated throughout the mother country. As
Chris Bongie has demonstrated, exoticism of the type Capper explodes created 'a
sense of an elsewhere', which itself became an imaginative necessity for those
living in the ever more industrialized West.49 Dickens himself inverts this practice
of an exoticist discourse at the beginning of Hard Times when he highlights the

barrenness of the Coketown imagination by invoking an Orient far removed from
the machinery and tall chimneys of the industrial town. Thus, the stifling
Benthamism of the fact-ridden Gradgrind and the pendantic M'Choakumchild is
emphasized by juxtaposing their arid imaginative faculties with the elaborate
mythology of The Arabian Nights:
He went to work in his preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty
Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to
see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy
boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by dost thou think that
thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes
only maim and destroy him! [HT 8]
Dickens also draws upon the stereotype of Eastern brutality and despotism here,
but as is evidenced by his later references to melancholy mad elephants, he uses
the Orient primarily as a signifier for frustration and entrapment. John Capper,
however seeks to remove this veil concealing the realities of Eastern life by
drawing attention to the many pitfalls of the Western influence in India. Like
Marx and Engels, he is keen to highlight the enormous deficits made by the
'Honourable East India Company9 and its less than honourable manner of
compensating for those shortfalls. Capper reveals that even in peace-time the
Company extracted, 'a tax of one half of their produce [from the Indian subjects],
and which to the poor ryot [peasant], with the addition of extra levies at the
zemindar's will, too often amounts to seventy or eighty per cent of the fruits of his
toil'.50 The piece goes on to reveal the lack of protection offered by the E.I.C.'s
laws and how corruption has flourished under the Company's rule. Ruthless
moneylenders are shown to have a large proportion of the peasantry in their grip,
largely as a direct consequence of understaffing and poor management by the
British. The most enlightened point that Capper makes is, however, that it is a
false economy to allow India to remain in such a backward state, since it will
prevent the advancement of trade and, more significantly, generate resentment. It
is in this respect that Household Words was truly groundbreaking. Just as it had
been among the first popular journals to pay attention to Russell's reports from the
Crimea and to condemn the British mismanagement of the war, so it was also one
of the first to acknowledge that trouble was brewing in India.
Punch also joined the campaign against corruption in India, although not on
the same scale as Household Words. A few snippets concerning the subcontinent
had appeared in the early 1840s, addressing issues like Indian railways and stock.
However, as with Household Words, the number of articles dealing with India
increased markedly in the 1850s. Pieces like 'Our Indian Commission' reveal a
growing awareness of misgovernment in India by bureaucrats and soldiers with
little or no knowledge of the territory. 'Our Indian Commission', for instance,
caricatures a number of Anglo-Indian types perhaps best embodied by the absurd
'Captain Stifflip of Her Majesty's Regiment of Dragoons' whose
pronouncements are reported with in a wonderfully elliptic, clipped military style:
Had been five years in India. Thought the Company a low set. Had a horse
shot under him in the Punjaub campaign, and the Company evaded giving
compensation by a paltry quibble. Thought the system of Government in
India infamous in every respect. Would go tomorrow to see every member of
the Court of Directors hanged. Thought the Court of Directors a mistake.
Young civilians wore moustaches. Had a contempt for any civilian who wore
moustaches. The men belonging to the Queen's regiments were shamefully
used, and so were their wives and families; while the sepoys were treated with
absurd indulgence. Sepoys were no good: they generally bolted when they
had a chance. Had seen some of the leading civilians in Calcutta. Thought
them awful snobs. Believed several of them had recently been detected in
mal-practices. Heard them spoken of as 'such fools' for being found out: not
as 'such rogues', for having been guilty.51
Punch is lampooning the military man himself for his bigoted and irrational
judgments. However, disregarding the more frivolous comments, the rumblings of
discontent can also be traced. Not only are the sepoys ironically dismissed as
being treated with indulgence, widespread corruption is also accentuated by the
way it is mentioned almost as a matter of course. However, it is in a mock
advertisement for a number of implements of torture to be approved by the
authorities at Leadenhall Street that the atrocities sanctioned by the E.I.C. are
brought to light. Along with the traditional thumb screws, a number of innovative
devices are also highlighted, for example, the labour-saving 'Scavenger's Younger
Daughter', which, rather alarmingly, comes recommended because it can be
worked by a child and because:
The trouble of hauling a prisoner up to a tree by the arms tied behind him, and
beating him at the same time with sticks on his shins, may thus be dispensed
with, by an operation which is as easy to the official as it is intolerable to the
native.2
Thus, the widespread practice of torture used by the East India Company as a
means of extorting revenue from the peasant class is exposed. The cruelty of the
E.I.C. in sanctioning such conduct was repeatedly condemned in the less ironical
studies of Household Words, such as the theologian Charles William Russell's
'Rent Day Round Madras' which examined the Report of the Commissioners for
the Investigation of Torture in the Madras Presidency. Russell certainly does not
evade the question of British responsibility. He points to the absurdity of one
English collector presiding over an area of between 3000 and 4000 miles and
argues that the bureaucrats running India are only interested in 'making (their) own
fortune(s) within the limited time, during which a European constitution can
remain proof against the climate'.53 The growing frequency with which reports of
this type appeared in Household Words reveals the journal's impressive
engagement in current affairs, its willingness to bring unseen official corruption to
public attention. The articles also demonstrate an increasing interest on the part of
both editor and writers in probing the sources and conditions of the production of
colonial wealth.
Although Punch's modus operandi was far removed from that of Household
Words, the two publications converged in their respective campaigns to expose the
Company's misrule. Curiously, they almost exchanged positions after the Mutiny
began, with Household Words expressing shock and outrage, and Punch pointing
out that the signs of growing unrest had been there for all to see, although
curiously Punch's cartoons are at odds with the journal's prose and are notable for
their demands for vengeance. Punch's acknowledgement of the Mutiny's
inevitability is captured superbly by the poem 'What Gammon!' which, in a parody
of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 'Excelsior!' attacked the stasis of the E.I.C. in
ignoring the 'storm cloud' of discontent on the Indian horizon.54 Prior to the
uprising, however, Household Words had been the dominant player in exposing the
East India Company's nepotism through investigative pieces like John Capper's
'The Great Indian Bean-Stalk' and 'A Pull at the Pagoda Tree'. The beanstalk in
question is akin to Benjamin Disraeli's image of the career politician climbing a
greasy pole, the top of which may only be reached through bribery and corruption.
At the root of the beanstalk is, of course, the E.I.C., yet significantly, in the pieces
dealing with British corruption in India, Capper does not draw on racial
stereotypes, but places the blame entirely on the East India Company. This
particular piece is concerned not simply with profiteering on the part of the British;
it also highlights how the Company has allowed corruption to flourish throughout
its territory.
One would imagine from the type of articles that appeared in Household
Words in the 1850s, that the Indian Mutiny would have been no surprise to
Dickens. However, in spite of repeated exposures of the brutalities committed in
the name of the Company, he seems to have been totally unprepared for the
insurrection when it occurred. His outraged indignation at what he perceived as a
betrayal on the part of the sepoys and the Indian peasants who joined with them
was, however, not simply the result of the construction of idealized oriental people
outlined here. Dickens's very public anger at events in Cawnpore became an
outlet for feelings of frustration, annoyance and restlessness relating to the
domestic policies of the British government.
Notes
1 William Howard Russell. My Diary in India in the Year 1858-9. (In two volumes).
London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1860. Volume I. 195.
2 Quoted in Harriet Martineau. British Rule in India: A Historical Sketch. London:
Smith, Elder & Co, 1857. v.
3 Christopher Hibbert. The Great Mutiny: India 1857. London: Allen Lane, 1978. 18.
4 For a full account of British annexations and Indian unrest see Lawrence James. Raj:
The Making and Unmaking of British India. London: Little, Brown and Company,
1997 and John Keay. India: A History. London & New Delhi, 2000.
5 Quoted in James. Raj. 119.
6 Hibbert. The Great Mutiny. 19.
7 Martineau. British Rule in India. 244-5.
8 'How to Make an Indian Pickle'. Punch, volume 33, 1857. 70.

9 Jane Robinson. Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Viking, 1996. 15.
11 Garrett Ziegler. 'A Mutiny in Household Words: Collins, Dickens and the "Perils" of
Empire'. VISAWUS conference 2002, Boise State University, 10-12 October 2002.
12 Quoted in The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8. 459-460
13 To Emile de la Rue. 23 October, 1857. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8.
473.
14 See William Oddie. 'Dickens and the Indian Mutiny'. The Dickensian. Volume 68,
number 366, January 1972. 3-17. Also Patrick Brantlinger. Rule of Darkness: British
Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
15 Sander L. Oilman. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and
Madness. 1985. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. 140-1. Oilman uses the term
to refer to the post-emancipation American propensity to undermine the humanity of
free blacks by dismissing them as mad, or depraved, or both.
16 To Miss Burdett Coutts, 3 February, 1857. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8.
273.
17 I do not claim that the British reading public was wholly unaware of India. Philip
Meadows Taylor had published his hugely successful Confessions of a Thug (of which
Dickens was an admirer) in 1839. Taylor drew upon his experiences in the Indian
army and as Indian correspondent for The Times. Writers of domestic fiction, however,
had difficulty—as I demonstrate in Chapter 1—in envisaging Britain's colonial
territories as anything more than a useful narrative stratagem, enabling them to exile
problematic characters, and occasionally to make their fortunes.
18 Goldie Morgentaler. Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 2000. 146.
19 For a detailed analysis of the sculptures of the Albert Memorial see Chris Brooks. The
Albert Memorial. Southend-on-Sea: White Dove Press, 1995. 46-7. Also Chris
Brooks (ed.). The Albert Memorial. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
20 The Official Descriptive & Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition (1851).
Volume 2. London: Spicer Brothers. Clowes & Sons, 1851. 857.
21 Catalogue. 929.
22 'A Guide to the Great Exhibition: The Foreign Department'. Illustrated London News.
10 May 1851. 392.
23 'East Indian Agriculturalists and Agriculture'. The Illustrated London News. 31 May,
1851. 489.
24 There was, however, profound respect for Arabic Africa and Egypt, as the birthplaces
of ancient civilizations, and the respect given to these areas was akin to that accorded
to India prior to the uprising.
25 Catalogue. 930.
26 Lara Kriegel. 'Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace' in
Louise Purbrick (ed.). The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. 149.
27 The Illustrated London News 10 May, 1851. 392.
28 Kriegel. 'Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851'. 161.
29 Catalogue. 924 & 931.
30 Catalogue. 931.
31 Punch. Volumes 20-21,1851. 174-5.
32 See Jenny Sharpe. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text.
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Nancy L. Paxton ['Mobilizing
Chivalry: Rape in British Novels About the Indian Uprising of 1857'. Victorian
Studies. Volume 36, number 1. 5-30] has drawn attention to the way in which the rape
discourse surrounding India was inverted by the British as the power structure of the
E.I.C. was reconfigured. Whilst Burke had envisioned the Indian sub-continent as a
woman's body being violated by the British men of business, and had attacked the
actual violation of Indian women by Western men, Paxton argues convincingly that the
trope was turned on its head between 1770 and 1857:
[T]he figure of the Englishman raping Indian women went through two major
transformations...First, the figure of the English man as rapist disappeared from
nineteenth-century discourse, which points to a more general silencing of both the
word and the metaphor that was occurring in English culture in the last two
decades of the eighteenth century...By the 1830s, then, Gothic conventions had
restructured English romances about India in such a way that Indian men were
usually assigned the role of the villain rapist while Indian women remained in the
victim's position that Burke so graphically described.
['Mobilizing Chivalry'. 7].
The addition of English women to the victim position in 1857 further complicated the
trope by placing the dominant power in a feminized, and hence vulnerable, position.
33 James. Raj. 179.
34 John Keay. India: A History. London and New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2000. 426.
35 Robert Young. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New
York: Routledge, 1990. 126.
36 Iris M. Zavala. 'Notes on the Cannibalistic Discourse of Monologism'. Bakhtin:
Carnival and Other Subjects: Selected Papers from the Fifth International Bakhtin
Conference, University of Manchester, July 1991. Critical Studies. David Shepherd
(ed.). Volume 3, number 2—volume 4, numbers 1-2. 1993. 263.
37 William Whewell, Master of Trinity College. Inaugural Lecture: The General Bearing
of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science. 26 November 1851.
London: n.p., 1851.
38 Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983. Paragraph 10.
39 Debord. Society of the Spectacle. Paragraphs 23-24.
40 James. Raj. 77.
41 Marx and Engels. The First Indian War of Independence. 77.
42 For a full discussion of the complexities of tracing colonial revenue and its
reinvestment, see Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback. Mammon and the Pursuit
of Empire: The Economics of British Imperialism. (Abridged Edition). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
43 Samuel Warren. The Lily and the Bee: An Apologue of the Crystal Palace. Edinburgh
and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1851. 37-38.
44 See, for example, To Miss Burdett Coutts, 25 July, 1852. The Letters of Charles
Dickens. Volume 6. 723. Records of Walter's short time in India are scant and
Dickens does not refer to his son's experiences in any detail. Dick Kooiman has
examined the few documents pertaining to Walter's Eastern career in his useful article
'The Short Career of Walter Dickens in India'. The Dickensian. Number 456, volume
98. Spring 2002. 14-28.
45 The number of articles relating to India rose from none whatsoever in the first volume
(30 March-21 September, 1850), to six in the fourth volume (27 September, 1851-13
March, 1852) and the numbers increase steadily in the years volumes preceding the
Mutiny. As the journal did not begin to appear until March 1850 it is difficult to judge
exactly how influential an element the Great Exhibition constituted in this emerging
interest.
46 To Mrs Gaskell, 31 January, 1850. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 6. 22.
Not all writers were attracted by the prospect of writing for a periodical bearing the
legend 'Conducted by Chiarles Dickens'. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to Miss
Mitford on 12 November 1851, complaining that the unsigned articles would lead the
public to conclude that everything was written by Dickens. She was particularly
concerned that the younger writers would be swallowed up by Dickens's reputation and
that they would not receive recognition for their work [Quoted in The Letters of
Charles Dickens. Volume 6. 451].
47 Quarles Quickens. English Notes: A Rare and Unknown Work Being a Reply to
Charles Dickens's 'American Notes'. With critical comments by Joseph Jackson and
John H. Sargent. New York: City: Lewis M. Thompson, 1920. 139.
48 [John Capper]. 'The Peasants of British India'. Household Words. Volume 4, number
95. 17 January, 1852. 389-393.
49 Chris Bongie. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siecle.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. 3.
50 [John Capper]. 'The Peasants of British India*. My brackets.
51 'Our Indian Commission'. Punch. Volumes 24-25, 1853. 139.
52 'The Question as Touching India'. Punch. Volumes 28-29,1855. 204.
53 [Charles William Russell]. 'Rent Day Round Madras'. Household Words. Volume
13, number 315. 5 April, 1856. 276-279.
54 'What Gammon!' Punch. Volumes 32-33,1857.
Chapter 6
A Tale of Three Revolutions: Dickens's

Response to the Sepoy Rebellion
"There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three
departments of Government: that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of
War, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of Public Works'.1
When the Native Infantry mutinied against the use of Enfield rifles, India ceased to
be a mere backdrop to national prosperity—whether real or imagined—and forced
herself into the consciousness of the British public. One would imagine from the
host of articles attacking the cruelty and incompetence of the East India Company
appearing in the early 1850s that Dickens would have been more sympathetic
towards the Indian people in their uprising. He was, after all, renowned for his
championship of social underdogs and his attacks on institutions that perpetuated
evil. However, his response went to the other extreme as he denounced the revolt
and called for its violent suppression. A large element of the Victorian outrage at
the uprising may undoubtedly be attributed to the involvement of women and
children in the conflict. Previous uprisings had never aroused the fury and
indignation that ensued from the massacre at Cawnpore. However, the presence of
the women was not the only factor behind the excesses that characterized British
responses. The subcontinent was envisaged as a vast text to be interpreted by the
Western gaze, and the uprising gave the lie to previous attempts to construct an
exotic, passive India, easily conquered by British trading concerns.
Jean-Fran£ois Lyotard's notion of cross-cultural exchanges between
fundamentally unequal traditional and modern cultures provides a useful model for
examining British intervention in India. According to Lyotard traditional cultures
depend upon narrative to consolidate what he describes as the 'social bond' and to
formulate knowledge. A modern culture is more concerned with 'proofs' and the
idea that 'the same referent cannot supply a plurality of contradictory or
inconsistent proofs'.2 When examining Victorian colonial expansion, the binary of
'traditional' versus 'modern9 cultures is rendered somewhat anomalous. As Linda
Colley has demonstrated, as Britain strove to assert herself as an industrially
advanced—and hence 'modern'—imperial force, the nation needed to be able to
view itself as a 'traditional' culture, even if a number of those traditions were
invented.3 British rule abroad was thus dependent upon a combination of the
traditional and the modern which constructed narratives of conquest and resistance
for the British themselves, while riding roughshod over the traditional narratives of
colonized nations. After the Great Exhibition and following an increase in
anthropological surveys of the subcontinent, Britain imposed its own narrative and
interpretations on India, which did not allow for a multiplicity of meanings—a
process that had already begun with the heightened missionary activity of the
1830s. With the decline of inter-racial marriages on the subcontinent, and their
ultimate ban for E.I.C. employees in 183S, cross-cultural exchange became a thing
of the past. The majority of Company employees were better versed in Latin and
Greek than in native languages, but believed that they could, nonetheless,
'understand' the indigenous population and pin it down to a series of 'types' or the
monolithic 'proofs' of which Lyotard speaks. Meanings and interpretations were
imposed upon India, and when the populace did not adhere to these preconceptions
or reacted to British dictates in an unexpected manner, this conduct in turn was
classified as rebellion.
The Mutiny exploded the Indian meta-narrative, albeit temporarily.4 In spite
of Household Words's mission to reveal the atrocities committed behind the Indian
veneer of prosperity, its stance during the uprising reveals that its writers and
editor were far from prepared for the violent reaction against British cultural
insensitivity. The journal may not have subscribed to the orientalized display of
prosperity disseminated by the Great Exhibition, but its writers had clearly formed
opinions on how the Indians should and would behave. Like Punch they had
accepted the stereotype of a languid and docile people and were outraged by what
they regarded as the sudden nature of the uprising.
As with a number of other publications, the Illustrated London News first
became concerned with the Indian Mutiny when it entered into a discussion of the
meaning of a series of circulating chapattis that began to perplex Westerners in the
weeks before the rebellion erupted. The compulsion to assign meaning to the
chapattis is itself a testament to the climate of suspicion and unease that dominated
Anglo-Indian relations at this time. The ILN was evidently bewildered by the
incident, and reported:
A strange, and to some observers a very disagreeable incident has occurred in
the north-west. A few days since a chowkeydar, or village policeman, of
Cawnpore, ran up to another in Futteghur, and gave him two chupatties.
These are indigestible little unleavened cakes, the common food of the poorer
classes. He ordered him to make ten more, and give two to each of the five
nearest chowkeydars, with the same order. He was obeyed, and in a few hours
the whole country was in commotion with chowkeydars running about with
these cakes. The wave swept province after province with a speed at which
official orders never fly. The magistrates were powerless, and the chupatties
at this moment are flying Westward. Nobody has the least idea what it all
means. Some officers fancy it is a ceremony intended to avert the cholera;
others hint at treason—a view encouraged by the native officials; others talk of
it as a trifle—a joke. For myself, I believe it to be the act of some wealthy
fool in pursuance of a vow; but its significance is this:—There are some
90,000 policemen in these provinces. If they should perchance imbibe
dangerous ideas, how perfect is their organisation!5
A Tale of Three Revolutions 115
One of the particularly interesting features of this extract is its insistence that these
"circulating cakes' must be invested with some kind of meaning and it
demonstrates once again an ongoing British mission to understand India. The
various interpretations offered point to the key anxieties that troubled the British
presence on the subcontinent: disease and dissent. Indian fears relating to food
pollution merge with British concerns at the imbibing of dangerous ideas, so that
the potential for revolt is configured as a poison and the chapattis are at once a real
and a metaphorical embodiment of mutual wariness against differing forms of
contamination. The chapattis, therefore, became a repository for British guilt and
anxiety about the 'other' as they made their way across the country. This quest for
meaning is a form of hysteria in itself, and Homi Bhabha has brilliantly described
the way the chapattis both manipulated and generated panic and rumour for both
the colonizers and the colonized:
The circulation of the chapatis constitutes an interesting problem for the
agency of historical discourse. The representation of panic and rumour
participates in that complex temporality of social 'contingency' with which I
have attempted to stain the clear waters of causality. The chain of
communication in the rumour, its semantic content, is transformed in
transmission, but despite exaggeration, hyperbole and imprecision, the
messages are syntactically 'contiguous'.6
Of course, what the chapattis really signified was how very little the British
understood India. The British themselves could circulate through the nation with
their telegraphs and road systems, gathering statistics and specimens as they went,
but they were easy prey for this relatively simple system of psychological warfare.
Household Words did not join the bewildered scramble to decipher the
chapattis until several months later in September 1857, when it was evident that
they had in some way signalled the impending revolt. In an extremely curious
article, 'Sepoy Symbols of Mutiny' a number of attempts are made to decode the
signs by citing such Western authorities as Herodotus and Theophrastus. Once
again European narrative and interpretative techniques are inappropriately applied
to a completely different culture. The author is especially engrossed by the
symbolism of some lotus flowers that were also in circulation at the same time as
the chapattis. After a plodding survey of the flowers' iconography in civilizations
from Ancient Greece to Ancient Egypt, and a quite excruciating account of their
botanical interest, the would-be semiotician admits his bewilderment by declaring:
I fear I may have indulged in too long an excursion into the realms of Botany,
to suit the reader who merely wishes to know why the Indian rebels choose
lotus flowers as signs of conspiracy. I am sure I am as innocent of the
knowledge as of the rebellion, but I will try to help my readers to a guess.7
Such an approach epitomizes much that was wrong with the administration of
India, and indeed with the governing process in Victorian Britain. The compulsive
gathering of facts and the belief that if enough data were accumulated, then the
other—be it a people or a problem—could be known and made comprehensible
was second nature to the society responsible for inventing the science of statistics.
As Hard Times demonstrates, Dickens was rather scornful of this process of fact
collection, and as early as The Pickwick Papers he illustrated the absurdity of the
grafting of knowledge about one way of life onto another. Mr Pickwick himself
spends much of the novel wandering about England misinterpreting signs and
being misled by most of those he encounters, just like the anthropological societies
in India. However, when he arrives in Eatanswill for an election, the hack
journalist Mr Pott reveals himself to be even more naive than Pickwick in his
belief that all information is easily transferable. He asks Pickwick if he has ever
read any of the literary articles in the Eatanswill Gazette:
"They appeared in the form of a copious review of a work on Chinese
metaphysics, sir", said Potts.
"Oh" observed Mr Pickwick; "from your pen, I hope?"
"From the pen of my critic, sir," rejoined Pott with dignity.
"An abstruse subject I should conceive", said Mr Pickwick.
"Very, sir", responded Pott, looking intensely sage. "He crammed for it, to
use a technical but expressive term; he read up for the subject, at my desire, in
the Encyclopaedia Britannica".
"Indeed!" said Mr Pickwick; "I was not aware that that valuable work
contained any information on Chinese metaphysics".
"He read, sir", rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr Pickwick's knee, and
looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority, "he read for
Metaphysics under the letter M and for China under the letter C, and combined
his information, sir!" [PP 719]
Laughable though the actions of Pott's critic may be, they are remarkably similar
to the conduct of the Household Words journalist responsible for the piece dealing
with the symbols of the Mutiny. He may describe historical precedents, folklore
and different significations for lotus flowers ad infmitum, but the process will
bring him no nearer to understanding its relevance to the current situation.
The game of generating meaning for the circulating bread and flowers was
certainly not the only narrative process that the British became involved in. When
the uprising first began nobody seemed unduly perturbed. In September 1857,
Dickens alluded to 'these distracted Indian times' in a letter to Sheridan Muspratt,
but it was not until a full month later that he first vented his spleen writing to Miss
Coutts.8 The precise reasons behind this inconsistency remain obscure. The
Cawnpore massacre had occurred on 27 June and Dickens would have known of it
from the reports in The Times. Concern for his second son Walter, who arrived in
Calcutta on 30 August 1857, may have played a part.9 It could also be that
Walter's letters (which did not begin to arrive until after the beginning of October
1857) passed on accounts of Indian hostilities. However, since none of the letters
received by Dickens are extant, one can only speculate on what they may or may
not have contained.10 Unsurprisingly, Household Words seems at first to have
reflected its conductor's initial lack of concern. Two of the first articles to appear
deal with previous uprisings in India that had been quickly crushed by the British.
Narratives of this kind were, as Martin Green has commented, 'the story England
told itself as it went to sleep at night; and in the form of its dreams, they charged
England's will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer and
rule'.11 In this instance, however, the stories of previous victories seem to have
bred a complacent confidence that the rebellion was simply one of a sequence of
minor revolts that had littered the history of British involvement in India, and
which would be quelled just like all the others.
In the Household Words piece, 'A Mutiny in India', E. [possibly Edward]
Townsend uses history in two ways to consider the current crisis, firstly, to
reassure the reader that the uprising in India is nothing new, and can be dealt with
easily.12 However, more remarkably, he employs the piece to criticize British
insensitivity to native customs and the nepotism advanced by the East India
Company. He points out that officers like 'Brigadier Daintry' (probably, as Lohrli
speculates, a veteran of the 1806 Vellore uprising) who were great leaders on the
battlefield, were not necessarily qualified to lead native regiments in times of
peace.13 It is suggested that Daintry and his kind are too firmly entrenched in the
past and not kept sufficiently busy to keep them out of mischief:
Daintry's misfortune was simply this: he had been born five hundred years too
late. As a feudal baron, unable to read and unused to think, most likely spent a
dull spell of rainy weather in yawning about his castle halls and kicking his
unoffending vassals, so did Daintry fall foul of his vassals as soon as there
were no enemies to be pommelled. The Brigadier had received an old-
fashioned education; that is to say, he wrote badly, spelt worse, and as a matter
of choice read not at all...So, as he was an abstemious drinker, and could not
always be hunting, he turned martinet and tyrant from sheer idleness.14
Townsend turns the usual discussion of Indian backwardness that featured so
prominently in the Great Exhibition Catalogue upon its head, pointing instead to
British regression. It is the Brigadier who behaves as if he were a feudal relic,
while his previous successes on the battlefield are exposed as resulting from pent-
up aggression, rather than cunning military strategies. Daintry is, in short, nothing
more than a bully who turns upon his soldiers for no other reason than ennui. As
with the present revolt, Daintry incurred the wrath of his men by disregarding their
religious principles and ordering them to shave off their beards. The narrator, who
claims to have acted as Daintry's interpreter, is keen to stress the lack of
understanding of the Indian character, and alerts the reader to the fatal misreading:
Daintry's headlong character would bear no check. He, long as he had been in
India had learned but one half of the native character. Many fall into the same
error. They see the submissive timidity, the ductile obedience, of the native;
his deference to authority or assumption; his childish reverence for rank; and
they think there are no limits to his endurance. Some day they are terribly
undeceived. So it was in this case.15
The narrative voice, however, falls into the same trap as its subject in assuming
that there is a single native character to be learnt. Notwithstanding this fact,
though, the piece is quite radical in its insistence that the insurrection of 1806—
and implicitly that of 1857—was not the 'conspiracy' alleged by the British, but
rather a reaction against the insensitivity of those in power.
This idea of a struggle for the conquest of India is revisited in a second
historical article, this time by the geographer and historian Sir Clements Robert
Markham. Markham was later to become head of geographical work in the India
Office between 1867 and 1877. The piece, The First Sack of Delhi' was later
reprinted in A General Sketch of the History of Persia (1874), but first appeared in
Household Words in mid-September 1857.16 The article deals with the Persian
defeat of the Moghal dynasty in India in 1739 and particularly emphasizes the
devastation the invasion caused, as well as the tyranny of the conquerors:
It is estimated that besides the treasure taken away, the Indians lost thirty
millions by damage done to houses burnt and fields laid waste. At least two
hundred thousand human beings perished at the time of this terrible visitation;
forty thousand between Peshawur and Kurnaul, one hundred and ten thousand
in the massacre, and fifty thousand by a famine caused by the ravages of the
invaders.17
By comparison, the present uprising appeared to be of small significance, and
clearly the article aimed to reassure readers by pointing to previous instances of
turmoil and volatility on the subcontinent. The depiction of a moribund Moghal
Empire would certainly have been of interest to those aware of the attempts to re-
install "puppet9 Maharajahs like the King of Delhi as rulers. The invasion story,
moreover, illustrates a kind of 'survival of the fittest', with the defeat of the
Moghals by Nadir Shah in 1737, followed by Clive's victory just twenty years
later. What remains unstated is a local prophecy, which had begun to re-circulate
in 1857, that India would be liberated from British rule on the one hundredth
anniversary of Clive's conquest. Markham is particularly keen to illustrate the
respective fates of both the conqueror and the conquered, tying both to the
contemporary conflict:
It might have been well, for the fame of the once mighty family of Timour, if
Mohammed Shah had fallen, sword in hand, at Kurnaul, instead of lingering
on in a disgraced existence in his ruined capital. His pitiable descendants sank
lower and lower, first in the power of the Affghans [sic] and Mahrattas, then
as pensioners of the British government; and now the representative of the
mighty Timour, the accomplished Shah Rokh, the brave and learned Baber,
and the magnificent Aurungzebe, has become the miserable puppet of that
gang of inhuman miscreants who await their doom in the city of Delhi.18
Like Townsend's article, this piece seeks to allay present anxieties by looking to
historical precedents. By tracing a tradition of uprising and suppression in India,
Markham successfully downplays the types of concern that would have arisen as
stories from Cawnpore began to filter back to the mother country. The attitude
shown towards India is also distinctly Darwinian, the implication being that the
tottering Moghal regime had been abjectly defeated by both the Persians and the
British during the last century, and that it was by no means fit enough to reassert
itself now.
The British penchant for creating narratives for and about India is nowhere
more apparent than in the reactions to the slaughter of women and children at
Cawnpore. The deaths and alleged violations of the women (more so than the
children) sparked the type of hysteria that characterizes Dickens's most reactionary
statements. There had been dissent in India in the past, but previous insurrections
had never seemed to threaten the sanctity of British womanhood as events at

Cawnpore had done. Interestingly, in November 1855, Sidney Laman Blanchard, a
former private secretary to Disraeli, now working in India as a journalist, had
reported for Household Words on the murder of two European ladies and a baby
during the Santal uprising of that year. Between 30 and 50,000 members of the
Santal tribe had rebelled against British rule and the reader learns:
They are now ravaging the country in the neighbourhood of Raj-mahal, and
thereabouts... Among the exploits of this peaceful and primitive people may be
noted, as a model to mere civilisation, the slaughter of two European ladies,
whose hands and feet they cut off; and the killing of an European baby, some
of whose blood they compelled its mother to drink—they themselves
partaking of the refreshment in a friendly manner.19
The piece gives the lie to Western anthropological assessments of the docility of
the Indian character and demonstrates that these people who have been dismissed
are far from 'peaceful' or contented. However, as it details an isolated incident, it
does not indulge in the panic of a number of the 1857 reports. Instead, the article
uncovers the provocation behind the uprising and offers numerous explanations,
ranging from over-taxation to a sacrifice to a native deity. A number of the
deficiencies of British rule are discussed, particularly the dependence upon a 'not
always trustworthy' sepoy army, along with the fact that hundreds of square miles
of India lacked armed forces altogether. Like all the others, this article draws upon
cultural stereotypes like the alleged 'laziness' of Hindus, yet it also expresses a
degree of sympathy for the exploitation suffered by the tribe.
While the murders of 1855 passed with comparatively little remark, those of
1857 unleashed an excess of emotion on a scale that had never been seen before.
The signs of revolt that may be traced through an examination of the pre-Mutiny
articles were forgotten in the frenzy of the moment. The accusations of rape at
Cawnpore, combined with evidence that defenceless women had been hacked to
death in cold blood, outraged Victorian Britain and resulted in widespread calls for
vengeance. The fact that such a violation would for a Hindu result in the breaking
of caste, and for a Muslim signal immense dishonour, was completely unheeded by
those calling for revenge at home. Just as insensitivity to cultural difference had
caused the uprising, so it now took control of the British imagination and amplified
fears of the other. The facts of religious doctrine were ignored and racial
stereotyping led to a failure to differentiate even between Hindus and Muslims.
The Indians were swiftly recategorized as 'natives', and although the insurrection
was largely confined to Northern India, all Indians became subjects of suspicion.
Norman Cohn has warned of the disaster that ensues when 'a paranoiac mass
movement captures political power', and paranoia seems to have reigned supreme
in much of the British press during 1857-8.20 It is partly the flow of information
and misinformation from Cawnpore that may be held responsible for the frenzied
demands for 'justice' to be done. Rumours abounded which frequently reflected
the salacious fantasies of the British themselves, rather than any act on the part of
the sepoys.
As Jenny Sharpe has so astutely observed, the crimes allegedly committed

against the women were all too frequently categorized as 'unspeakable'.21 This
unspeakability provided a space into which the Victorian imagination could pour
all its guilt and anxieties, including latent concerns about the violation of the
Indian subcontinent. The Bibighar in which the women were massacred can itself
be seen as a repository for the growing British paranoia, as it was quite literally
inscribed by the soldiers who visited it in the slaughter's immediate aftermath. In
Lieutenant Charles Crump's initial illustration of the carnage scene, the walls of
the Bibighar are blank, however later visitors to the site reported that they were
covered in graffiti. G.M. Trevelyan, writing in 1865 described the transition from
slaughterhouse to spectacle:
Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing through the
rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could the outraged earth
have straightaway hidden. The inner apartment was ankle-deep in blood. The
plaster was scored with sword-cuts: not high-up, as where men have fought;
but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the
blow. Strips of dresses, vainly tied round the handles or the doors, signified
the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping
out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills of children's
trousers, and torn cuffs...An officer picked up a few curls, preserved in a bit
of cardboard, and marked "Ned's hair, with love": but around were strewn
locks, some near a yard in length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other
scissors. All who on that day passed within the fatal doors agree positively to
assert that no inscription of any sort or kind was visible on the walls. Before
the month was out, the bad habit, common to low Englishmen, of scribbling
where they ought not, here displaying itself in an odious form, had covered the
principal buildings ofCawnpore with vulgar and disgusting forgeries, false in
date, in taste, in spelling, and in fact.22
It would seem that the material artefacts dropped by, or severed from the women
were not sufficient evidence for the troops who visited the scene. Hair and combs
could be, and were, removed by the first to arrive as grisly mementoes of the
bloodshed. What was needed, though, was a written record of events; thus, the
Bibighar was converted into a text by men who inscribed the building with
'evidence' of what had taken place, perhaps as a means of coping with the
massacre. Trevelyan, apparently unwittingly, offers an insight into contemporary
class tensions with his dismissal of the 'low Englishmen' who are unable to spell
and whose acts of inscription are 'disgusting' and 'odious'. Whilst the upper and
middle classes had the leisure to produce multi-volumed accounts of the rebellion,
the working-class foot soldiers seem to have attempted to deal with their emotions
by inscribing them on the very site of the atrocities. Yet, their efforts to give
voices to the suffering women and to provide them with a lasting memorial are
misread by Trevelyan as mere vandalism. By referring to the men in derogatory
terms and casting aspersions upon their honesty by describing their accounts as
'false' and 'forgeries' Trevelyan comes dangerously close to aligning the foot
soldiers with the sepoys for no other reasons than their emotional response and
their lack of education. The account of the working-class Englishmen thus

emphasizes the lack of tolerance and understanding between classes of the same
nationality, let alone races, and it also draws attention to the parallels between the
wider discourses of race and class.
The perceived assault on British womanhood was certainly an important factor
in Dickens's decision to speak out publicly on the revolt. In 1852 he had declined
to become involved on either side of the debate regarding the actions of Sir James
Brooke who was accused of resorting to inhumane methods in his mission to
eradicate piracy in Borneo. Dickens wrote to James Thomson:
I have my doubts on the merits of the Bornean proceedings, and can by no
means consent to make the least allusion to them. Not to mention that I think
the introduction of such a topic in a mixed company, would be extremely
impolite and dangerous.23
The Indian revolt obviously incensed him to an extent whereby he was prepared to
speak out on the type of issue that he would previously have regarded as the
business of politicians and colonial administrators alone. Indeed, so indignant was
he in the wake of the Cawnpore massacre that he used the Christmas number of
Household Words to express his outrage publicly. The anger ignited by the Mutiny
is nowhere more apparent than in 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners', and the
intentions behind the story are made clear by an examination of Dickens's
correspondence. He wrote to Miss Courts:
It is all one story...of which I have written the greater part (Mr Collins has
written one chapter), and which I have planned with great care in the hope of
commemorating, without any vulgar catchpenny connexion, or application,
some of the best qualities of the English character that have been shewn in
India. I hope it is very good, and I think it will make a noise.24
The story itself is a thinly veiled allegory for the rebellion, in which a party of
British travellers, on an island appropriately named 'Silver-Store', off the coast of
Belize, are menaced by pirates and 'a treacherous half-caste negro' named
Christian George King. The British themselves do not completely escape criticism
as the mindless bureaucracy of the East India Company is attacked through an
absurd diplomat, Mr Pordage and his equally ridiculous wife, both of whom have
an inflated sense of their own importance. When she is rescued from certain death
Mrs Pordage responds by 'cutting' the ladies around her, 'on account of her not
having been formally and separately rescued by Captain Carton before anybody
else' [CS 251].25 In fact, ludicrous though her conduct appears, it mirrors that of
English women at a number of the Mutiny's sieges, who insisted on maintaining a
rigid social hierarchy even when they were starving and under fire. The story is
narrated by Gill Davis, a private in the Royal Marines, who bears more than a
passing resemblance to Sidney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities in his hopeless
devotion to the story's heroine, the rather insipid Marion Maryon, who acts as the
illiterate private's scribe. At the narrative's beginning, Davis attests to the
indelibility of the historical record from which nothing may be omitted or
expunged, even though years have passed since the incidents took place. He
declares in an impassioned moment of his mistress and amaneusis, 'She won't
scratch it out, and quite honourable; because we have made an understanding that
everything is to be taken down; and that nothing that is once taken down shall be
scratched out'. [CS 175] Davis is ostensibly referring here to the fact that he is
recording his feelings toward Miss Maryon, now the wife of another, less lowly,
participant in the adventure, Captain Carton. However, his protestations also point
once more to Dickens's own heartfelt belief that the actions of the sepoys should
be condemned openly and without equivocation.
The plot revolves around the threat posed to the vulnerable and virtuous
British female body—quite literally embodied in Miss Maryon—by the vicious and
bloodthirsty pirates. In spite of Household Words's repeated exposes of Indian
grievances against the British, the native who betrays them in this re-working of
the uprising (and who may be most closely aligned with the sepoy rebels),
Christian George King, is conspicuously lacking in any kind of motive whatever.
Indeed, like the ordinary Indian peasants who allied themselves with the sepoys, he
seems to switch his allegiance pragmatically to the power most likely to triumph,
in this case, the band of pirates. The outlaws themselves are not of any single
nationality, and we learn that:
There were Malays among them, Dutch, Maltese, Greeks, Sambos, Negroes,
and convict Englishmen from the West India Islands...There were some
Portuguese too, and a few Spaniards. [CS 199-200]
The presence of the English criminals in the band would appear to problematize
the association of treachery with foreignness that Dickens points to in his chapters
of this story. The fact that they alone are explicitly identified as convicts goes
some way to divest them of their national identity—the criminal class can be
dismissed as 'not English' during this most Podsnappian of times for Dickens.
However, it is Christian George King—referred to by Davis as a 'cannibal' [CS
191], presumably out of sheer disdain, as he is never seen to eat anyone—who is,
because of his duplicity, the true target of Dickens's anger. The pirates make no
attempt to hide their evil, while Christian George King represents the type of
'double-dyed traitor and.. .most infernal villain' [CS 193] whom Dickens identified
with the betrayers of the women and children at Cawnpore. Indeed, in keeping
with Dickens's uncompromising condemnation of the sepoys in 1857, Davis
unashamedly and repeatedly declares a sweeping prejudice against indigenous
peoples, announcing rather bewilderingly, 'I never did like Natives, except in the
form of oysters' [CS 182].
Aside from the many racist swipes at the treacherous native, the story is a
celebration of the valour of English men and women of all classes, but particularly
of the working man. Like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and the heroic
explorer Richard Wardour in Collins and Dickens's play The Frozen Deep (first
performed in January 1857), Davis is willing to risk his life to save Miss Maryon
who, like many English women in India had asserted that she would rather be
killed by her countrymen than fall into the hands of the enemy.26 In Dickens's
reworking of the rebellion, however, there is no massacre. Admittedly a child and
an elderly lady die, but the account stresses the bravery of the women, rather than
their fate. He revises the narrative of the horrible slaughter to downplay the
rebels's triumph and emphasize what he clearly perceived, at the time at least, as
the superior qualities of the British, which would ultimately lead to the defeat of
the sepoys. Collins, who was responsible for the second chapter, responded to the
events more calmly than Dickens and his contribution is far more conciliatory in
tone. In his section it is the Portuguese Pirate Captain who becomes the most
serious threat and of whom Maryon Maryon declares, 'Dread the Pirate Captain,
Davis, for the slightest caprice of his may ruin all our hopes,—but never dread the
Indians' [CS 234]. Although the word 'Indians' is likely to refer to West Indians
or Native Americans (given the locus of the action in Central America) Collins's
usage seems deliberately ambiguous, and points to the type of more sympathetic
response to the sepoys that he was later to display in his depictions of British
plunder in The Moonstone [1868]. Yet, at odds with this warning against the Pirate
Captain is the scene where he depicts an almost absurd Pirate Captain strumming
his guitar, and another in which even the uncouth pirate is repelled by the smell of
the natives:
"Something to write on", says the Pirate Captain. "What? Ha! Why not a
broad nigger back?"
He pointed with the end of his cigar to one of the Sambos. The man was
pulled forward, and set down on his knees with his shoulders rounded. The
Pirate Captain laid the paper on them, and took a dip of ink—then suddenly
turned up his snub-nose with a look of disgust, and removing the paper again,
took from his pocket a fine cambric handkerchief edged with lace, smelt at the
scent on it, and afterwards laid it delicately over the Sambo's shoulders. [CS
205]
Garrett Ziegler has commented that Collins seeks to dispel the threat of rape
overhanging Dickens's first chapter by presenting a camp, parodic Pirate Captain
'languishing...with a nosegay in the bosom of his waistcoat' [CS 215] , menacing
male, not female bodies. Through deflecting the threat away from the ladies who
are otherwise remarkably similar to the women of Cawnpore, Collins defuses the
tension of Dickens's first, complicating reactions to the plot by reducing Mr
Pordage to a state of traumatized insanity in the aftermath of a battle. Pordage's
fleeting madness is, perhaps, representative of the wider state of trauma affecting
the English in their brutal responses to India. What is certain is that Collins
viewed evil in less manichean terms than Dickens at this time, and although his
views on race may not have been as totalizing as his mentor's reactionary opinions,
they were equally complex and confused. Laura Peters has argued, following
Brantlinger, that for Dickens this tactic pointed to a deep-rooted colonial anxiety
that led him to equate all natives with savagery and rebellion:
It is possible.. .to read.. .Dickens's location of the tale in Central America (and
what Dickens refers to as the West Indies), as an extension of the idea of
mutiny to other parts of the empire by equating East Indians, native Indians
and Africans with each other and therefore implying all 'natives' are
untrustworthy. Dickens's underlying comments can be identified in the
protagonist Gill's warning to 'trust no Sambo, and, above all, if he could get
any good chance at Christian George King, not to lose it, but to put him out of
the world'.27
However, for Collins, the conflation serves a less straightforward purpose, which
signals the ambivalence of his feelings toward the rebels. Ultimately, the
juxtaposition of Collins's moderation against Dickens's anger accentuates the
latter's fury at the attack on the vulnerable women and children all the more. It
would seem that some other factor was propelling Dickens's frenzy and that the
helplessness of those who fell at Cawnpore had come to embody his unease about
a number of other matters too.
The 1850s heralded an increasingly pessimistic worldview for Dickens in
which neither institutions nor individuals were prepared to take responsibility for
their actions. The Fleet in Pickwick casts a momentary shadow over an essentially
humorous plot, yet when the Court reappears in the Bleak House [1852-3]
Chancery case, its influence is all-pervasive and its corruption has spread to the
very fabric of dilapidated rookeries like Tom-AH-Alone's and the primal ooze
which opens the novel. The stasis and decay generated by the continually delayed
'day of judgment' in the Jarndyce versus Jarndyce case affects not merely
procrastinating wards like Richard Carstone or the deranged Miss Flite, it
permeates to public institutions and spreads inertia everywhere. As outlined in
Chapter 4, the Crimean War had only exacerbated Dickens's feelings of despair as
he realized that the nation was being run by those versed only in the art of 'HOW
NOT TO DO IT' [LD 104]. Dickens's descriptions of the Circumlocution Office,
like those of the bumbling officialdom in 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners'
may initially beguile the reader with their humour. However, it is only when one
realizes precisely how much influence the institution possesses that its dangerous
nature may be appreciated to its full extent. The office is not simply obstructive, it
(mis)manages everything and is apparently indestructible:
Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes,
parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary motions
made or threatened about it, by demagogues so low and ignorant as to hold
that the real recipe of government was How to do it. Then would the noble
lord or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it was to defend the
Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a regular field-
day of the occasion. Then would he come down to that house with a slap upon
the table, and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot. Then would he be
there to tell that honourable gentleman that the Circumlocution Office not only
was blameless in this matter, but was commendable in this matter, was
extollable to the skies in this matter...the Circumlocution Office was always
voted immaculate, by an accommodating majority. [LD 106].
If the parliament elected to serve the people was concerned only with protecting its
own interests, then it is hardly a surprise that Dickens was becoming increasingly
depressed in his outlook. The incompetence that had killed so many troops in the
Crimea seemed almost enshrined as a national institution, and as the recurring
motif of the prison in Little Dorrit demonstrates, it threatened to entrap everyone.
The stasis to which the country had been reduced added to his growing depression
in the 1850s, but as this passage so painfully demonstrates, it was futile for him to
continue his attacks on a self-perpetuating and self-sustaining bureaucracy. This
fact obviously added to the anger he was obliged to repress and which smouldered
away until it found an event which would allow it to be released.
As the article 'To Working Men' demonstrated [see Chapter 4], Dickens was
keen, at least in theory, to see the working man roused from his lethargy into action
against the forces of Circumlocution. At the very least, he wanted the workforce to
be aware of the mismanagement to which it had been subjected. The character Gill
Davis in 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners', who declares 'England means
nothing to me' [CS 197] would seem to represent Dickens's model working-class
man, in that he is prepared to do his duty to a country that has failed to care for
him, although he is under no illusions as to England's negligence. As Laura Peters
has highlighted:
"Perils" is concerned with issues of family, extension of domesticity,
imperialism and a colonial discourse of savagery vs. civilisation applied both
to England and colonial subjects. "Perils" revolves around Gill, a male orphan
who, defined as outside the family, has suffered the oppressed existence of the
marginalised: the social institutions have failed him in their parental role.28
Peters goes on to argue for a type of doubling between Davis and Christian George
King, both of whom are marginalized subjects between whom there exists a binary
relationship in which, she suggests, 'it is possible to identify the colonial mirror
image of the colonizer in the other'.29 I would argue, though, that Dickens equates
both characters as different types of the colonized, both oppressed by the English
ruling classes. Davis is kept in a position of subordination through his inability to
read—resulting from a lack of care over his upbringing—and tragically, he is
unable to accept the promotion eventually offered to him as a reward for his
valour, since he simply cannot overcome his illiteracy. In spite of his rough
language and dismissal of his negligent home country, Davis—like the working
men of England Dickens had tried unsuccessfully to rally—is a decent man who
will do his duty out of an instinctive need to do what is right during times of crisis.
While the Englishman was prepared to submit to the type of misrule that would
bring fatal diseases like cholera down upon him again and again, the likes of
Christian George King and the Indian ryots who supported the sepoys rebelled, in
Dickens's eyes, out of sheer malice. This juxtaposition of two very different
reactions to misrule inevitably made Dickens's condemnation of the Indians all the
stronger. Indeed, as Lillian Nayder has put it, 'Not only did racial conflict in India
expose class differences in England; the image of the treacherous sepoy enabled
Dickens to imaginatively resolve those very differences'.30
The Mutiny allowed the various crises at play in Dickens's mind to come to a
head, providing an outlet and focus for his suppressed rage. The fusion of public
and private malaise is perhaps most evident in a letter of December of that year to
Mrs Richard Watson. Dickens oscillates between a discussion of events in
Cawnpore and the intentions behind the allegorical account of the uprising that he
and Collins had put together. He then flits to a chivalric musing which would
seem to be an attempt to vent his frustration at both the new object of his affection,
the young Ellen Ternan's apparent unattainability, and the feelings of entrapment
he had begun to associate with his marriage. Finally he returns to the troubles in
India to speak of his son Walter's progress at Dum-Dum. Given the repeated motif
of a man sacrificing his life for a woman who will never belong to him which
appears in both 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners' and A Tale of Two Cities,
it would seem that the connections made in the letter are more than a coincidence.
The violent upheaval thousands of miles away provided Dickens with a target onto
which he could legitimately discharge his fury, without any fear of being labelled
either a reactionary or a subversive—it was much easier to hit out at the sepoy
rebels than the British government. Indeed, as the editors of the Pilgrim edition of
Dickens's letters make clear in a footnote which reads like an apologia for
Dickens's views in the 1850s, 'CD's imaginary threats of revenge were less
horrific than those expressed by many British commanders in the field as well as
by sectors of the press in both India and England'.32
The anger unleashed by the Mutiny seems, uncontrolled though it may have
been, to have provided Dickens with a new resolve and clarity of vision, allowing
him to forcefully articulate his incandescent rage. The horrors of the Bibighar at
Cawnpore, however, gave him a free range to express his sentiments exactly as he
was feeling them, allowing him to call for retribution in a way that he could never
do when attacking organizations like the British government. Indeed, a series of
letters to The Times complaining at working-class reticence in rushing to enlist in
the Indian army enabled Dickens to point to how the working classes at home had
been stripped of all power. At the same time he attacked the arrogance of the
upper and middle classes in expecting working men to come forward to serve a
nation which had done nothing for them. He ranted,
When I see people writing letters in the Times day after day, about this class
and that class not joining the Army and having no interest in arms—and when
I think how we all know that we have suffered a system to go on, which has
blighted generous ambition, and put reward out of the common man's reach—
and how our gentry have disarmed our peasantry—I become Demoniacal.33
Dickens no longer had to repress his feelings, but could wallow in a very public
anger, hitting out at all the institutions that stood in the way of progress and fusing
his long-held anger at domestic maladministration and nepotism with fury at the
sepoy rebels. Having suppressed it for so long, his outburst was truly demonic
and, in terms of its potential influence, downright dangerous given his immense
public following. In a letter to Emile de la Rue of October 1857, Dickens used the
uprising to question the competence of both the British and the Indian ruling
powers:
Why did they know nothing of the Hindoo character? Why? Do you ask
why? Because it was the system to know nothing of anything and to believe
that England, while doing nothing, was doing everything. There are
Thousands of Asses now—and Asses in power: which is the worst of it—who
will hold this faith—if one could dignify such idiotcy [sic] by the name—until
they have done for all of us. It is not three years since there were Indian
Princes here; and in the rush after them, that baser side of the genteel character
which would go Tuft-Hunting after the Devil was exhibited in a most

astounding degree. Again and again, I have said to Ladies, spirited enough
and handsome enough and clever enough to have known better (not of the
15,000, please to observe!) "what on earth do you see in those men to go mad
about? You know faces, when they are not brown; you know common
expressions when they are not under turbans; Look at the dogs—low, —
treacherous, murderous, tigerous villains who despise you while you pay court
to them, and who would rend you to pieces at half an hour's notice." I
suppose a greater mistake was never committed in the world than this
wretched Lord Canning's maudlin proclamation about mercy. It would have
been bad enough if the Hindoos lived in the Strand here, and had the ideas of
London vagabonds; but addressed to the Oriental character, it is hideously
absurd and dangerous.34
While the passage begins with another onslaught on the incompetence of British
rule, it is rapidly transformed into a discourse of race and class. On the one hand
he is attacking women like the society hostess-turned traveller, Lady Lucie Duff
Gordon. Lady Gordon had been vocal in her support of the Indians during the
Mutiny, yet Dickens seems to have dismissed her greater cultural understanding as
a bedazzlement with the exoticism of foreign royalty and an attempt to climb the
'toady tree' that he so resented. For Dickens, there is something repellent in the
idea of a white woman paying court to one of these men, which the word
'Ladies'—immediately evocative of those other ladies in Cawnpore—along with
the image of tearing them apart reiterates. The society women in London, like the
ladies in the Bibighar, are just as vulnerable to the treachery of the 'Oriental
character', and misguided in their trust. However, it is the unreadability of the
Indian that he seems to regard as their most dangerous characteristic. When he
describes the unfathomable phrenology of the brown-faced, turban-wearing rebel,
he inadvertently cuts to the bone of the national hysteria and the form of
stereotyping which has made the Indian unreadable by reducing her/him to a type.
This unreadability clearly troubled Dickens since he also refers to it in The Perils
of Certain English Prisoners when Gill Davis condemns Christian George King by
observing the rebel's hypocritical behaviour just before his betrayal of the British:
The innocent spirits that Sambo Pilot was in, and the impossibility he found
himself under of showing all the little colony, but especially the ladies and
children, how fond he was of them, how devoted to them, and how faithful to
them for life and death, for present, future, and everlasting, made a great
impression on me. If ever a man, Sambo or no Sambo, was trustful and
trusted, to what may be called quite an infantine and sweetly beautiful extent,
surely, I thought that morning when I did at last lie down to rest, it was that
Sambo pilot, Christian George King. [CS 175-176].
India was not the readable text that it had appeared to be and rather than conceding
that interpretations had been imposed upon the subcontinent, public figures like
Dickens condemned an impenetrability which they associated with deception. Of
course, Dickens was able to express himself freely in private letters addressed to
trusted friends like de la Rue, but given the national horror and outrage at events in
India, he could and did discharge his anger in public too. He resumes the torrent of
racial abuse, which characterizes his letters of this period, in a speech made at a
benefit in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children in February 1858:
He hoped, he said, it would not be incompatible with the latest fashion, if he
reminded the company that a large portion of the army were at this moment in
India employed in punishing great treachery and great cruelty, and in
upholding a government which, whatever its faults, had proved immeasurably
superior to any Asiatic rule.35
This notion of a 'fashion' of referring to India is illustrative of exactly how
liberating the crisis was. Now that a trend of speaking out had been established,
there was no need for Dickens to repress his feelings, although a comparison of his
public and private comments on the government of India demonstrate that he was
still a little hesitant in attacking the authorities openly. At this stage, Dickens
equated the atrocities committed during the Mutiny solely with the Indian people.
He thus reduced the cruelty to a national characteristic and sought to distance the
white rulers from a despotism that had always been associated with the Orient, by
asserting their relative benevolence in comparison with the despotic regimes of the
past. Such commentary is, however, somewhat incongruous in the light of
Household Words's censure of the E.I.C.'s methods of extracting payments earlier
in the decade. However, it was not until William Howard Russell's reports began
to filter back to Britain that Dickens began to reassess his rather binary initial
reaction. Prior to this stage, the rebellion was significant only as an opportunity for
catharsis and for the temporary crystallization of his extraordinarily complex and
fluctuating views on race.
Just as his reports from the Crimea had struck a chord with Dickens's
frustration at nepotism and poor administration, so Russell's reports for The Times
did a great deal to quell his calls for revenge, which had been extremely racialized
in tone. Dickens's declamations were grounded in the belief that the atrocities
committed in India were unique to the natives; they were cruel and evil, but we, the
British were not. Even in his most extreme demands for revenge, Dickens had
always stressed that the reprisals should be just and swift. Russell's reports,
however, blurred this binary perspective in their coverage of equally appalling and
cowardly deeds on the part of the British, which would certainly have conflicted
with Dickens's strong belief that they should set an example of civilized behaviour.
Russell recounted a number of needlessly sadistic acts by British soldiers, such as
when he described the maltreatment of native servants. He remarked:
I was very much shocked to see in this court-yard, two native servants,
covered with plaisters and bandages, and bloody, who were lying on their
charpoys, moaning. On inquiring, my friend was informed by one of the
guests that they were So-and-So's servants, who had just been "licked" by
him. I have heard it defended; but no man of feeling, education, or goodness
of heart can vindicate or practise it.36
Reports of this nature posed an indubitable challenge to the type of
pronouncements Dickens had been making on the nature of the Hindu or Muslim
character. His own correspondence with Russell—who made contact with both
Walter Dickens and the popular novelist Catherine Gore's son whilst on his fact-
finding mission—is noteworthy for its far more calm and moderate tone:
Everybody talks about your letters, and everybody praises them. No one says,
or can say, more of them than they deserve. I have been deeply impressed by
your suggestion, in your note to me, of the miseries and horrors by which you
are surrounded; and I can well understand what a trial the whole frightful,
revengeful, morally and physically burning, business must be to an
affectionate and earnest man.37
This passage is the most conciliatory of all Dickens's reactions to the insurrection
and marks another turning point in his extraordinarily active thought process. In
the light of the information gleaned from Russell he completely reassessed the
violent emotional response that had resulted in 'The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners', and the results of this reappraisal may be found in A Tale of Two Cities.
William Oddie has classified A Tale of Two Cities as belonging to a sustained,
hysterical anger that begins with the carnage at Lucknow and which, far from
abating, builds up and leads directly to Dickens's support for Governor Eyre in
1865. Patrick Brantlinger has commented that:
His Carlylean view of the Revolution as irrational, frenzied, and bloodthirsty
is close to his view of the Mutiny. The coincidence of names between Captain
Carton and Sidney Carton and some of the metaphors in the novel also suggest
India: Dickens frequently likens his French characters to tigers, as when he
says of Madame Defarge that "opportunity had developed her into a tigress".38
While there are certainly connections between the novel and the short story that
pertain to the sepoy rebellion, to assume that the novel is simply an expanded
version of the rage which fired the story is to underestimate severely the versatility
of Dickens's mind and the challenges his thinking faced between 1857 and 1859.
The fact that a character's name is re-used—a tactic to which Dickens resorted
extremely rarely—certainly does alert the reader to the common theme of the two
works. However, to accept the parallel at face value is to ignore a number of key
differences between the two works, along with the primary evidence suggesting
that by 1859 Dickens had calmed down significantly. A Tale of Two Cities is,
rather, a reworking of his initial narrative of the rebellion that seeks to revise his
original stance. Such an argument, however, does not fully account for the
different levels of allegory at play in the novel. The Parisian mob does not simply
represent the sepoys in India, but also the working classes of Britain. Dickens had
addressed the idea of the underclass seizing power in response to the
Government's failure to implement sanitary reform in the early 1850s. The energy
and violence of the crowd scenes is notably similar to that in Barnaby Rudge, itself
an historical novel dealing with contemporary concerns—in this case, the Chartist
activity of the 1840s was displaced onto a depiction of the Gordon riots of 1780.
Dickens's fusion of the French Revolution with British working-class unrest and
the sepoy insurrection, is itself paradigmatic of the developments in his thinking by
1859. He was profoundly sympathetic towards the unrepresented workers and had
even seemed to call them to arms earlier in the decade. However, there is an
ambivalence in his portrayal of the violence of the crowd which suggests that
although he understood the reasons behind their unrest, he remained very much
afraid of any revolutionary force when it took to the streets en masse.
The force and might of the combined crowd is superbly conveyed in the
passage from A Tale of Two Cities depicting the crowd's efforts to intimidate the
tax collector Monsieur Gabelle (himself an obvious allegorical figure to represent
the hated salt tax) and his kind:
Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were other
functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom the rising sun
found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they had been born and
bred; also, there were other villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the
mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and the
soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But, the
fierce figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be that as it
would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the gallows that
would turn to water and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch of
mathematics, was able to calculate successfully. [TC 222]
The passage's apocalyptic imagery demonstrates an obvious fear of the crowd once
roused from its lethargy to redress the wrongs committed against it, and this is a
factor that William Oddie excludes from his assertion that the novel offers another
representation of the troubles in India. If we are to equate the sepoys with the
revolutionary mob, then we must also regard the corrupt Monsignor and his class
as analogous to the governors of India. Dickens may have been unable to accept
such a point of comparison in the early days of the uprising, but his letter to
Russell indicates that he would be more responsive to the Indians' grievances by
1859. In fact, he may even have recalled Household Words'* stand against the
unchecked nepotism and brutality of the E.I.C. and the numerous passages he
published referring to the heavy taxation endured by the third estate parallel the
rack-renting suffered by the Indian ryots, or peasant class. The plight of the
French peasantry is portrayed with great compassion, and the aristocracy is held
responsible for their privation:
We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common dogs are
by those superior Beings—taxed by him without mercy, obliged to grind our
corn at his mill, obliged to feed scores of his tame birds on our wretched
crops, and forbidden for our lives to keep a single tame bird of our own,
pillaged and plundered to that degree that when we chanced to have a bit of
meat, we ate it in fear, with the door barred and the shutters closed, that his
people should not see it and take it from us—I say, we were so robbed, and
hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing
to bring a child into the world, and that what we should most pray for, was that
our women might be barren and our miserable race die out! [TC 308]
This scene bears extraordinary similarity to accounts put forward by Marx and
Engels to illustrate the numerous factors underlying the Indian uprising.
Significantly, they too chose to compare India to revolutionary France:
The first blow dealt to the French monarchy proceeded from the nobility, not
from the peasants. The Indian revolt does not commence with the ryots,
tortured, dishonoured and stripped naked by the British, but with the sepoys,
clad, fed, petted, fatted and pampered by them.39
Although Marx and Engels's point here is to stress the need for a leadership,
usually bourgeois, to orchestrate a revolution, their graphic description of the
horrors inflicted on the peasantry demonstrates why the class was, like the French
Third Estate, so ready to follow the call to arms. Dickens had undoubtedly arrived
at a similar conclusion, and although in classic liberal reformist fashion he was
unable to condone the violence of any body of people rising up against their
oppressors, he could certainly empathize with their suffering; but only by
displacing it to revolutionary France.
It is worth asking—in spite of his dire predictions on the imminence of a
working-class uprising to Miss Courts—how Dickens would have responded to an
insurrection in England during the 1850s. The fact that he repeatedly resorted to a
process of historical displacement in order to entertain the possibility exemplifies
an unwillingness to face the prospect. Equally, his earlier attempts to reiterate the
otherness of the Chartists in The Old Curiosity Shop by depicting them as
'savages' [OCS 335] show a very real fear of the workforce when its members are
pushed to the limit. Through creating a French Third Estate that is analogous to
both the British working classes and the Indian rebels, Dickens came close to
acknowledging that his reaction of 1857 was driven by fear and incredulity. The
parallel also displays his arrival at a clearer understanding of the motives of the
Indians. Yet, the religious solution offered by Sidney Carton's sacrifice, which
looks to the Second Coming to resolve all earthly inequalities, reinforces Dickens's
inability to perceive revolution as a tangible solution to social problems. The
contrapuntalism of his mind enabled him to amend and update his ideas and even,
at times, to hold apparently contradictory opinions. In spite of this fact, though, he
was not sufficiently radical to be able to envisage the chaotic force of any
revolution in a positive light, and it is this repulsion that governed his responses in
1857.
Dickens's comments on India may be attributed to shocked disbelief and
reflect a vehement prejudice that was rapidly overcome. The racialized discourse
that he adopted clearly displays a growing belief in the inferiority of non-white
races that was never to leave him, but it was his indignation at the Cawnpore
massacre, combined with more personal frustrations and annoyance at the stasis of
England, which impelled him to make these feelings public. Never again would he
lose control and vent his spleen to his readers when faced with an overseas event
(such as the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865) in which the British found themselves
pitted against a subordinate race. It is the erratic nature of Dickens's outbursts
that, owing to his public position, made his reactions all the more dangerous during
1857-8, but which also points to the fact that he was far from being a systematic
racist. A firmly entrenched racist is easily categorized, her/his more outrageous
comments may be dismissed as mere rants. In addition s/he will not be so easily
outraged or surprised by uprisings like those seen at Cawnpore and Lucknow; s/he
will rationalize the situation by asserting that they are other, they are savages,
therefore they cannot be expected to behave as we do. Dickens was on one level,
disappointed by the Indians, whom he had believed to be a peaceable people. Yet,

his response is unlikely to have been significantly different at this time had the
working classes acted upon his calls for them to demand reform. A Tale of Two
Cities is a partial acknowledgement of this realization in its implicit conflation of
the working classes and the sepoys. The writing of this novel was instrumental in
Dickens's exploration of the entanglement of his views on class and race. The
Indian revolt was significant in reformulating and complicating his racial views,
but not in the totalizing manner that previous studies have suggested, and certainly
not for any sustained period of time.
Notes
1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The First Indian War of Independence. 1959.
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. 15.
2 Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 24.
3 See Linda Colley. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. 1992. London: Vintage,
1996, especially chapter two.
4 New measures in 1860 to dress native troops in 'traditional' Indian uniforms involving
turbans demonstrate that the British were still committed to a process of orientalism in
spite of the lessons they should have learned from the Mutiny. With the distance that
the uprising had put between the Indians and the British, natives now had to look like
natives in order to reinforce their otherness.
5 'Circulating Cakes'. The Illustrated London News. 18 April, 1857. 369.
6 Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
200.
7 [John Robertson (attributed)]. 'Sepoy Symbols of Mutiny'. Household Words.
Volume 16, number 389. 5 September, 1857. 217-40.
8 To Dr J. Sheridan Muspratt, 4 September, 1857. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volumes. 431.
9 Kooiman. 'The Short Career of Walter Dickens in India'. 21.
10 Dickens, as is well known, destroyed virtually all of his correspondence after the
publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's biography of Byron in early 1860.
11 Martin Green. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge, 1988. 3.
12 Ann Lohrli has not been able to pin down the identity of this author and puts forward
several candidates. She lists: 'Edward Townsend, conductor, Dept. of Public Works,
2nd Division, thereafter warrant officer; Edward Nelson Townsend, captain, 31st Regt.
Native Infantry; Edward Richard Townsend, assistant surgeon. See Lohrli, 449.
13 Lohrli. 449.
14 [E. Townsend]. 'A Mutiny in India'. Household Words. Volume 16, number 386. 15
August, 1857. 154-6.
15 [E.Townsend]. 'A Mutiny in India'.
16 For further information on Markham's life, see Lohrli 353-354.
17 [Clements Robert Markham]. 'The First Sack of Delhi'. Household Words. Volume
16, number 391. 19 September 1857. 276-79.
18 [Clements Robert Markham]. 'The First Sack of Delhi'.
19 [Sidney Laman Blanchard]. 'The Santals'. Household Words. Volume 12, number
294. 10 November, 1855. 347-349. Blanchard reprinted a collection of his pieces on
India from Household Words and All the Year Round in The Ganges and the Seine
(1862) and Yesterday and To-Day in India (1867), the latter included some essays from
Temple Bar. For more information about Blanchard see Lohrli, 209.
20 Quoted in Elaine Showalter. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture.
(Second Edition). London & Basingstoke: Picador, 1997. 5.
21 Jenny Sharpe. Allegories of Empire. 66.
22 G.M. Trevelyan. Cawnpore. 1865. Macmillan's Colonial Library. London and New
York, 1894. 275. My italics.
23 To James Thomson, 11 June 1852. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 6. 694.
Joseph Hume had repeatedly demanded an inquiry into Brooke's actions. The hearing
took place later in the year and Brooke was cleared of all charges.
24 To Miss Burdett Coutts, 25 November, 1857. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume
8. 482-3.
25 All references to 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners' are taken from the
Everyman edition, which is one of the few versions in print to include Collins's
chapter. See Charles Dickens. The Christmas Stories. Ed. Ruth Glancy. London:
J.M. Dent, 1996.
26 Andrew Sanders reminds us that Sidney Carton's name was originally Dick, a
shortened version of Richard and a sly reference to Dickens's own name, as well as a
reminder of connections between the sacrifices of The Frozen Deep and A Tale of Two
Cities. Andrew Sanders. The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities. London: Harper
Collins, 1988. 70.
27 Laura Peters. 'Perilous Adventures: Dickens and Popular Orphan Adventure
Narratives'. The Dickensian. Number 446, volume 94. Winter 1998. 176.
28 Laura Peters. 'Perilous Adventures'. 177.
29 Laura Peters. 'Perilous Adventures'. 178.
30 Lillian Nayder. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian
Authorship. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2002. Nayder's excellent
study provides a discussion of Dickens's engagement in the debate over working-class
recruitment for the armed services.
31 To the Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 7 December, 1857. Charles Dickens. The Letters of
Charles Dickens. Volume 8. 487-489.
32 The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8. 459-60. ff 8.
33 To Miss Burdett Coutts, 4 October 1857. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8.
458.
34 To Emile de la Rue, 23 October 1857. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 8.
472-3. The piece then continues with the exact words Dickens uses in the letter to
Angela Burdett Coutts, which is cited at the beginning of Chapter 5.
35 K.J. Fielding. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. 247.
36 Russell. My Diary in India in the Year 1858-9. Volume I. 389. Maire nf Fhlathuin in
'Anglo-India after the Mutiny: the formation and breakdown of national identity'. In
Stuart Murray (ed.). Not on any Map: Essays on Postcoloniality & Cultural
Nationalism. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997. Fhlathtiin draws attention to
the fact that Russell himself did not give a full account of British barbarity. Russell's
reports are juxtaposed with other eyewitness accounts to reveal the way in which he
amended his diary to make it more palatable to the British public. The role of English
soldiers in acts of cruelty is often down played so that loyal Sikhs are shown to be the
active agents, while the English are implicated in the cruelty through their failure to
act. Whereas in other accounts, the British are shown to participate in the violence and
looting, Russell all too often revises their part to that of mere observers. In Russell's
version of events they are frequently guilty of non-intervention, but not of brutality.
37 To W.H. Russell, 7 July, 1858. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 8. 600.
39 Marx&Engels. The First Indian War of Independence. 81.
Chapter 7
Containing Cawnpore: The Reinvention

and Reinterpretation of the Indian
Mutiny
'As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we
shall drop right away to a third-rate power' [Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, 1899-
1905]1
'The decline and fall of empires are not affairs of greased cartridges. Such results
are occasioned by adequate causes, and by an accumulation of adequate causes'.
[Benjamin Disraeli]2
The wave of uprisings across India between 1857 and 1859 undoubtedly sent
Shockwaves across the British Empire. It is arguable that the British imperial sense
of self never folly recovered from the insurrection, with the Union flag of the
residency at Lucknow remaining obdurately hoisted from the end of the siege until
the declaration of independence in 1947. Lawrence James has illustrated the depth
of anxiety generated by the rebellion with his observation that:
[T]he Mutiny had left behind a legacy of paranoia which, in the passage of
time, lost nothing in its power to make the flesh creep. In 1918, young British
subalterns, fresh to India, were given a solemn lecture on the Mutiny by a
senior officer which ended with a warning that history might repeat itself if
they were not vigilant.3
Frequently referred to as the jewel in Britain's imperial crown, in the uprising's
aftermath, possession of India became inextricably linked to Britain's sense of
itself as an imperial power. To lose India would be to lose all: both self-esteem,
and respect in the eyes of the world. For British writers, the Mutiny became, to
adopt Dickens's metaphor, a type of imaginative loadstone rock, drawing in both
novelists and historians up until the present day. The British simply could not
leave the rebellion alone; they analyzed it, interpreted it and mulled it over ad
nauseam in a plethora of articles, reviews and commentaries. Dickens's new
journal for the 1860s, All the Year Round was certainly no exception and initially
engaged heartily in the scrutiny of the revolt, just as Household Words had sought
eagerly to uncover its causes.
On 27 July 1858 Benjamin Disraeli, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had
challenged Parliament, in a three-hour-long speech to consider whether the
uprising was a military rebellion or if it had wider implications pertaining to the
British maladministration. He believed that support was widespread and observed
that the conduct of the sepoys was that of men who were 'not so much the
avengers of personal grievances as the exponents of general discontent'. Disraeli is
remarkable for his readiness to take responsibility for the uprising with his
declaration that:
I shall show, or endeavour to show to the House to-night that our Government
in India of late years has alienated or alarmed almost every influential class in
that country. I shall show, or endeavour to show to the House to-night that the
mutual suspicions and prejudices between rival religions and different races,
which were the cause of segregation between powerful classes in that country,
have of late years, in consequence of our policy, gradually disappeared, and
that for them has been substituted an identity of sentiments, and those
sentiments, I am sorry to say, hostile to our authority. I shall have to show to
the House how these feelings have led to communication between classes who
never communicated before. I shall have to show to the House how
communication led to conspiracy.4
The speech goes on to explain that previous regimes in India have toppled as a
result of interference with native religions. Disraeli had an incisive understanding
of the Indian situation and acknowledged that the turmoil had been generated
through attempts to change centuries of tradition and superstition too rapidly.
Interestingly, the speech opens with a comparison of the uprising to 'A street riot
in Boston and at Paris [which] turned out to be the two great revolutions of modern
times', a phrase that offers tempting parallels with Dickens's later introduction to A
Tale of Two Cities, as well as offering the radical suggestion that the Indians had
themselves been involved in a war of independence.5 Disraeli himself was
particularly outspoken on the dangers of missionary activity, although only when it
was combined with government interference. He understood that Britain's grasp
on India was largely owing to the religious and cultural differences between
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, which had hitherto prevented the groups from uniting
in opposition to foreign rule. The 1857 uprising was the first time that Hindus and
Muslims had combined against the British, and Disraeli's own later policy on
governing India sought to accentuate the divisions between them, operating a
policy of 'divide et impera\6 Such attributions of blame to the British rulers went
against the wave of condemnation for the sepoys and did little to enhance
Disraeli's often precarious popularity. Punch seized upon his deliberate cultivation
of an aura of Oriental mystique and suggested that it was his Eastern blood (or as
Podsnap would have had it, something intrinsically 'not English' about him) that
led him to identify with the rebels. See Figure 7.1 The Asiatic Mystery as
Prepared by Sepoy D'Israeli'—a response to the speech of 27 July, which depicts
Disraeli as a dark-skinned rebel, cooking up a false story for the House of
Commons out of native cheek. Here Punch demonstrates both the hostility that
was widely shown towards those expressing sympathy or empathy towards the
mutineers, along with a deliberate attempt to represent Disraeli's 'weakness' as
somehow conspiratorial and totally other. In short, to be capable of sympathy with
the sepoys, could only mean that Disraeli had become one of their number.
Containing Cawnpore 137
THE ASIATIC MYSTERY.

AB Prepared by .Sepoy Dlmali.
7.1 'The Asiatic Mystery'. Punch. 8 August 1857.65.

JUSTICE.
7.2 'Justice'. Punch. 12 September 1857. 109.

7.3 'British Homes in India, 1857'.

Man$elI/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
7.4 'Miss Wheeler Defending Herself Against the Sepoys'.

Charles Ball. The History of the Indian Mutiny. Volume I. Between
380 and 381.
Disraeli's understanding was lacking in that he speculated that the uprising

was the result of a Russian plot to avenge that nation's defeat in the Crimea.7
However, when compared to the post-Mutiny rants of men like Herbert Edwards,
who firmly believed that the revolt was a divine punishment to the English for
allowing heathen religions to prosper in her territories, Disraeli's conspiracy theory
appears reasonably moderate. Edwards agitated for the immediate abolition of
caste divisions, the implementation of British law and forced conversion to
Christianity for all Indians. Notwithstanding this extremism, the majority of
politicians viewed the problem as nothing more than a matter of military strength:
it seemed obvious that the sepoys had risen up because there were not enough
European regiments in India to intimidate them into remaining subordinate.8 The
implication that according to this version of events, the Indians were deeply
discontented and could only be held in their places through a display of military
might does not appear to have been confronted by exponents of this theory.
Overall, once the uprising had been put down, little attempt was made to fathom
why it had occurred. This omission may partly be attributed to the insistence that
the rebellion was militaristic in character (although the Bombay and Madras armies
remained loyal and only twenty-five per cent of the sepoys in the Bengal army
joined the rebellion), and partly to the more pressing concern with maintaining
British rule in India and dismantling the East India Company once and for all.
In his personal capacity, Dickens had surprisingly little to say about the latter
stages of the uprising and barely touched upon the alleged clemency of the
Governor-General Charles John Canning in his letters.9 Dickens's outrage at the
treatment of the women at Cawnpore had been assuaged through Russell's reports
of British looting and pillage. Initially he had attacked Canning, in 'The Perils of
Certain English Prisoners', by portraying the ridiculous official, Commissioner
Pordage remonstrating against 'unnecessary cruelty' towards the pirates, who
represent the sepoys. The official condemnation of reprisals is further lampooned
with the scornful assertion that, 'Government requires you to treat the enemy with
great delicacy, consideration, clemency, and forbearance' [CS 179]. Captain
Carton—who appears to be Dickens's textual representative—responds with the
type of emotional language that his creator had employed in his own
correspondence of 1857:
I am an English officer, commanding English Men, and I hope I am not likely
to disappoint the Government's just expectations. But, I presume you know
that these villains under their black flag have despoiled our countrymen of
their property, burnt their homes, barbarously murdered them and their little
children, and worse than murdered their wives and daughters? [CS 179]
However, in spite of the imagined dire outrages, prompting euphemisms like
'worse than murdered', Dickens's response was soon tempered. It would seem
that having unconsciously used his rage as an outlet for his disillusionment at the
state of the nation, his priority soon became to distance himself from his initial
angry and emotional reactions. Just as the Household Words articles of late 1858
to 1859 demonstrated a marked shift in tone, so the tenor of All the Year Round
became increasingly challenging when confronting the British mismanagement of
the rebellion. Of course, part of this shift may be attributed to the fact that the
revolt had by this time been altogether suppressed. Interestingly, there are no
attempts to examine the reasons behind the insurrection, which is extraordinary
when one considers the large number of articles dealing with the need for
administrative and social reform carried by Household Words in the run-up to the
Mutiny. The early months of the Mutiny are characterized by a positive mania to
analyze the reasons underlying the uprising. The classifieds sections of
newspapers like the Illustrated London News were filled with advertisements for
rapidly produced works, usually by former military men or ex-Company
employees, promising to reveal the true reasons behind the revolt. Henry Mead's
The Sepoy Revolt: Its Causes and its Consequences, advertised for sale in eight
volumes on October 24 1857, is just one example of the many handbooks and
guides available, and of attempts to cash in on the unrest. Overall, the compulsion
to decode the signs of unrest that had been a characteristic of pre-Mutiny was
conspicuously absent from the majority of post-rebellion accounts. The
investigative journalist William Howard Russell of The Times, originally sent to
Cawnpore to discover the truth behind the salacious tales pedalled back in Britain,
was one of the exceptional few who persisted in searching for the revolt's origins.
Given this widespread unwillingness to address root causes, the need for
writers (a significant number of whom had never even set foot on the subcontinent)
to continually return to the Mutiny in their work is intriguing. Canning's highly
unpopular "gagging act' of 1857, which muted the British press in India, may offer
one explanation for the need to write about the issue. The silence imposed upon
Anglo-Indian writers during the uprising perhaps made the subject all the more
attractive and compelling. Interestingly, this fixation with documenting the
Mutiny was unique to the British. Only six Indian histories of the uprising were
published between 1858 and 1900, and of the three hundred works produced
between 1858 and the present day only seventy-two can be attributed to Indians.
The remainder were predominantly by British authors.10 The Indian
historiographer S.B. Chaudhuri has commented that:
[T]he overwhelming number of works on the Indian Mutiny bears the most
tangible proof of the deep emotional involvement of the British public in the
nineteenth century in the fortune of the 'Empire', the existence of which was
threatened by the rising of the sepoys...There was a tremendous renewal of
interest in British Paramountcy in India and a whole set of apologists,
particularly the mutiny veterans, who wrote their 'Memoirs' with justifiable
pride described the story of the Indian Mutiny as one in which Englishmen
will never cease to be interested, or that as long as the 'Empire' endured and
the British people existed, the Mutiny, the 'noble epic' that it was, will not
cease to speak to every Englishman. The Mutiny thus furnished an excellent
medium for a display of the magnificent and stunning exploits of British
valour.11
Chaudhuri is absolutely correct to suggest that the memoirs and stories spawned by
the revolt were attempts to bolster a flagging national pride through the creation of
an imperial epic. Yet the accounts, both factual and fictitious, also point to the
British need to reassert themselves as rulers and, more importantly, to distinguish

the conquerors from the conquered.
The Mutiny stimulated even more fictional re-workings than factual. The
number of novels set during the uprising literally runs into hundreds with Philip
Meadows Taylor's Seeta (1872) and Flora Annie Steel's On the Face of the Waters
(1896) representing some of the more enduring outpourings of the nineteenth
century. In the late twentieth century JG Farrell's The Siege ofKrishnapur (1973)
and George MacDonald Eraser's tongue-in-cheek parody of the story for boys
genre, Flashman in the Great Game (1975) both demonstrate the fascination that
the revolt still holds for novelists over one hundred years after the event. In terms
of Dickens's literary responses to the uprising, 'The Perils of Certain English
Prisoners' was blatantly a reaction to the news from Cawnpore, while his later
allegorization of the Mutiny in A Tale of Two Cities was much more subtle, and
can be easily missed. However, for the Victorian reader, following the story in
periodical format, the regular framing of instalments by articles exploring the
rebellion, for instance 'An Empire Saved' (28 May 1859) and 'How the Victoria
Cross was Won' (30 July 1859), would point to parallels that the reader of the
story in novel form would perhaps miss.
For the British, then, history was a narrative to be amended and embellished as
circumstances required. Between 1857 and 1858 the British had lost control of the
meta-narrative they had constructed for India prior to the rebellion. It was only at
the beginning of 1859 that they tentatively began once more to take hold, not only
of the nation, but also the discourses surrounding it. These discourses are perhaps
best defined by Sara Suleri, who refers to them as 'narratives of anxiety' in her
discussion of the 'trauma' generated by the colonial encounter. Suleri argues:
In historiographic terms, colonial trauma can be read only in the context of an
apocalyptic "end" or "beginning" of empire, even though a merely cursory
knowledge of the trials of English India makes evident the obsession of that
idiom's, and that era's engagement with the transfer of power. This
transference constitutes an immigrant idiom alternative to an apocalypse that
cannot see beyond its own vision of localized terror...The narratives of
anxiety that emerge from such a system are consequently colonial testimonials
in which aggression functions as a symptom of terror rather than of
possession. Most typically, such terror translates into the ostensible
unreadability of the colonized subcontinent: from the early travelogues in the
seventeenth century to the proliferation of Anglo-Indian fiction in the
nineteenth, the dominant Western metaphor for India suggests a spatial
intrasigence, or a geography so figural that—like the Marabar Caves—it can
be read by Western eyes only after its transmutation into a threadbare and
dangerous literalism. This unreadability is of course simply one instance of a
discursive transfer of power, which fetishizes a colonial fear of its own
cultural ignorance into the potential threats posed by an Indian alterity.12
Suleri's terminology is certainly useful, yet her argument that the narrative of
anxiety may be detected at all stages of British involvement in India is too
totalizing and depends upon reading colonial texts with the joint benefits of
hindsight and E.M. Forster! The fear generated by the Mutiny was so intense, and
reactions were so extreme, not because the English had spent the one hundred
years of their rule in a state of abject terror at the unfathomability of the other, but
because they had always regarded India as an open book that they could read. The
narrative of anxiety did not emerge in India until 1857 and certainly, during the
months of the uprising, the monolithic story the Europeans had told themselves
about their Indian holdings collapsed under its own contradictions. Instead, a
whole series of conflicting narratives emerged, working against one another and
serving only to generate further anxiety. The putting down of the revolt therefore
also involved the suppression of the speculation, rumour and exaggeration, which
had come to characterize British accounts of the rebellion.
Unlike many periodicals, All the Year Round was remarkably swift to abandon
its anti-Indian stance and ostensibly return to normal. Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine continued to discuss the revolt throughout the 1860s with in-depth
articles like 'The Pursuit of Tantia Topee' (a narrative of the capture of a rebel
leader), 'The Administration of India' and 'Our Only Danger in India' appearing in
every other issue. However, by late 1860 All the Year Round seemed, more or less,
to have drawn a line under events. It can, of course, be argued that since the
uprising had been quelled, discussions like those appearing in Blackwood's were
simply no longer of interest in a weekly journal priding itself on both its
contemporaneity and its commitment to domestic social reform. Articles on India,
dealing with subjects of general interest like the Indian cotton industry (an
important source for Lancashire mill owners once the blockading of the American
South had begun) re-emerged in late 1860, following a three-year absence from
Dickens's periodical, thus signalling what would appear to be a return to normal
relations. Dickens's abandonment of the rebellion as newsworthy subject matter
seems to have stemmed from a desire to leave behind the violence of his initial
reaction, combined with a sense that, having rectified that response in A Tale of
Two Cities, the issue could be laid to rest.
The early British accounts which tried to make sense of the Mutiny's warning
signs may be viewed as 'narratives of hysteria'. Athena Vrettos has usefully
defined hysteria as 'moments of discursive crisis when the capacity to tell a
coherent story breaks down', a concept which is particularly important when
considering retrospective accounts of the rebellion. If we think back to the
multitudinous interpretations of the circulating chappatis put forward by journals
like Household Words and The Illustrated London News in the early months of
1857, we can see how the Indian grand narrative—formulated by the British in the
wake of the Great Exhibition—gave way to a series of speculative minor
narratives. These lesser narratives sought to ground cultural anxiety and
bewilderment in rational explanation. Absurd as many of the explications may
now appear, they represented a genuine anxiety to understand exactly what was
going on and, in a wider sense the desperate attempts to find one authoritative
narrative which would allow the British to resume discursive control.
In the long term the hysterical accounts of sepoy atrocities served to create
insurmountable divisions between the rulers and the ruled and to stimulate the type
of fear that Suleri rightly detects in early twentieth-century novels like A Passage
to India or The Raj Quartet. However, the immediate function of the narrative of
anxiety was to rally the British. The ghastly inventions of over-active imaginations
acted as anti-Indian propaganda. Records of soldiers spurring themselves to fight
with cries of 'Remember Cawnpore!' demonstrate the role that these oft-
dangerous fabrications (exemplified by allegations of the rape of memsahibs and
the torture of small children before their deaths in the Bibighar) played in re-
establishing British hegemony. By 1859 these accounts had served their purpose
and William Howard Russell was able to amend the hyperbole surrounding the
slaughter of the women by attempting to downplay the novelty of the situation and
even to point to precedents in European history:
But, though pre-eminent among crimes, the massacre of Cawnpore is by no
means singular or unprecedented in any of the circumstances which mark
turpitude and profundity of guilt. We who suffered from it think that there
was never such wickedness in the world, and the incessant efforts of a gang of
forgers and utterers of lies have surrounded it with horrors needlessly invented
in the hope of adding to the indignation and burning desire which the naked
facts aroused. Helpless garrisons surrendering under capitulation, have been
massacred ere now; risings such as that of the people of Pontus under
Mithridates, of the Irish Roman Catholics against the Protestant settlers in
1641...of the assassins who smote and spared none on the eve of St
Bartholomew, have taken place before, and have been over and over again
attended by inhuman cruelty, violation, and torture. The history of medieval
Europe affords many instances of crimes as great as those of Cawnpore; the
history of civilized nations could afford some parallel to them even in modern
times. In fact, the peculiar aggravation of the Cawnpore massacres was this,
that the deed was done by a subject race—by black men who dared to shed the
blood of their masters and mistresses, and to butcher poor helpless ladies and
children, who were the women and offspring of the dominant and conquering
people. Here we had not only a servile war and a sort of Jacquerie combined,
but we had a war of religion, a war of race, a war of revenge, mingled together
in a contest in which the insurgents were also actuated by some national
promptings to shake off the yoke of a stranger, and to re-establish the full
power of native chiefs, and the full sway of native religions.14
Russell's analysis here is remarkable not only for its refusal to subscribe to the
manicheanism of previous accounts of the revolt, but also for its understanding of
the multi-faceted nature of the war. He registers that there existed 'national
promptings' to overthrow the British and does not reduce the conflict to a mere
military insurrection. More importantly, he is also one of the rare reporters able to
recognize the rebellion's racial and cultural dimensions, along with the English
propensity to overstate the outrages committed against them. Russell's parallels
between European and Indian massacres are particularly interesting, as they hark
back to the pre-Mutiny conception of India as an infant civilization, capable of
growing up in the image of the more advanced European culture. Moreover,
Russell was one of the few to cling to the notion that India could still aspire to
European 'greatness', a stance to which Dickens never quite seems able to have
been able to revert.
In an early parallel between events in India and the catastrophe of the Crimean
War, the ILN had assertively pronounced that this time, 'she [Britain] will be
strong enough, rich enough, and united enough, to fight her own battles against all
opponents'.15 Yet by 1860 All the Year Round had begun to point to less agreeable
similarities in an article entitled 'Money or Merit', which attacks the nepotism of
the Indian army's promotion scheme. The English system is compared
unfavourably to that of France, where soldiers were only promoted on ability, and
the fact that the examples cited pertain to India suggests an origin for the troubles
of 1857-9.16 The criticisms within this radical article are quite extraordinary when
compared to more self-congratulatory pieces appearing in sources like
Blackwood's, which emphasize British strength, along with moral and
technological superiority. All the Year Round was, to a degree, a participant in this
self-laudation, publishing pieces like 'An Empire Saved' and 'How the Victoria
Cross was Won'.17 However, as both of these articles were part of a campaign on
behalf of Sir John Lawrence, they were bound to concentrate on British successes.
Notwithstanding this fact, gushing phrases like, 'Then came India, with its
wilderness of heroisms, each deed grander, and more wonderful than the last. Here
everyone was a hero; and the very women and children caught the infection', seem
to take a national tendency to turn representations of disaster into depictions of
triumph to an almost ludicrous extreme.18 The piece's comparisons with the
heroes of the Crimean disaster should alert the reader to the inflated rhetoric of this
account of British prowess. The article also demonstrates an early need to
categorize the insurrection against a pre-existing type, even if the process involved
a misprision of what were essentially catastrophic events.
Aside from these rather peculiar campaign articles, All the Year Round was
generally more critical of the government, as is demonstrated by pieces like
'European Mutiny in India', attacking the transfer of the Indian Army from the
East India Company. The author purports to be an MP who served as a private
soldier in the Bengal artillery twenty-five years before. Rather than stressing the
consequences for India, he focuses on the undemocratic nature of the forced
transfer, and complains that private soldiers had not the freedom to resign if they
were unhappy with the arrangement. He suggests that had Lord Clyde, the
Commander-in-Chief of the army in India, not managed the situation with
delicacy, then a further mutiny would have erupted in India, this time involving
trained soldiers in allegiance with native rebels.19 It is clear that at this stage
emotions were still running high, and that the well-being of the Indian populace
was not yet being considered. However, Dickens's journal had certainly begun to
re-evaluate its stance by attacking the types of mismanagement and nepotism that
had always caused anguish to its conductor. This piece may therefore be viewed as
a transitional article, marking a gradual movement to a more objective position and
the resumption of normal relations between the two races.
The re-establishment and restructuring of British power in India was marked

by the commencement of a new series of narratives, many of which persisted even
beyond Indian Independence. Maire ni Fhlathuin has remarked astutely that:
Indian insurrection threatened the Anglo-Indians9 control of India, but did not
alter their status; their response to that insurrection, however, was such that the
undesirable elements of irrationality and uncontrolled violence, long
associated with the Indians, had to be recognized as part of their own image.20
Accounts like Russell's, which cut through the emotive reactions of the Anglo-
Indians, certainly forced Dickens to reconsider his initial indignation. An
examination of illustrations from Punch such as 'Justice' [Figure 7.2] and
'Vengeance, or the Bengal Tiger' reveals a distinct lack of British mercy in the
revolt's early days. Indeed, stories of sepoys blasted from the mouths of cannon
and defiled through the force-feeding of abhorrent foods would have made many
initially outraged liberals uncomfortable in the extreme. Such behaviour directly
identified the British with the very conduct they had sought to suppress and
aligned them uncomfortably with the alleged savagery of the sepoys. It was
therefore necessary to reassess British pretensions to civilization as Dickens was to
do in his allegorical equation of Anglo-Indian cruelty with that of Monseigneur
and his class in A Tale of Two Cities. However, the re-figuring of relations
between governors and governed took a far less enlightened form, which rather
than repairing divisions, sought instead to segregate the Indians from the British
once and for all.
According to post-Mutiny official policy, beliefs in the potential for native
improvement had been mistaken, and the Indians were now seen as irredeemably
savage and destined to be eternally governed. Lawrence James has explained
superbly the alarming volte face and the reasons behind it:
From what they had read in the newspapers, supplemented by the more-or-less
instantaneous memoirs and histories of the Mutiny, the British were presented
with a story in which a people, hitherto believed capable of improvement,
turned against their helpers in the most vicious manner imaginable. It was not
just the Raj which [had] been attacked; the revolt was an onslaught against
everything the mid-Victorians cherished. Firing cannon balls at railway
engines symbolised a wilful and irrational rejection of technical progress. The
killing of women and children was a calculated assault on national moral
values.21
In the Mutiny's aftermath a new set of narratives came into play as Britain sought
to repair its fractured sense of self. Joseph Noel Paton's famous painting, In
Memoriam (1858) may be viewed as a superb motif for the revisionist process. In
the original version of the picture, a group of Cawnpore women and children were
shown huddled together, awaiting their doom at the hands of a group of distinctly
unsavoury sepoys. However, when it was exhibited, the obvious implication that
victims were on the brink of violation and mutilation was considered so abhorrent
that Paton was forced to paint out the sepoys and replace them with a group of
Highland soldiers coming to the rescue. Key elements of the insurrection were
therefore removed from the painting in an attempt to turn an unpalatable
catastrophe into a triumph. The piece's title was revised to In Memoriam to the
Christian Heroism of the British Ladies in India during the Mutiny of 1857, and
their ultimate Deliverance by British Prowess, and it is the re-assertion of 'British
Prowess' that characterizes not only Paton's work, but the majority of British
histories and journalistic articles produced from 1859 onwards.22
In spite of primary evidence to the contrary from key figures in the field like
Lieutenant Frederick Roberts (later Field Marshal Earl Roberts), part of the
reconstruction process involved downplaying the wider civil insurrection and
stressing its militaristic aspects. Roberts declared on 30 September, 1857, 'What
nonsense The Times talks about the Mutiny being confined to the army. In this
district [Bulandshahr] there never was an Army'. However, such opinions were
restricted to private correspondence only. Even in the early days of the uprising
the Illustrated London News had reported:
At home the Government does not deceive itself on the urgency and vital
importance of the subject. It acknowledges by its acts, if not exactly by the
words of those who speak for it in Parliament, that nothing less is involved in
the issue of the conflict than the retention of India and our place in the world.
This comment exemplifies the position held by India in Britain's construction of its
national imperial identity. To acknowledge that the revolt was far more
widespread would also be to admit to the unpopularity of British rule, and to cast
the subcontinent's administrators in the role of tyrants. In denying more general
discontent, the illusion of relatively democratic government by a more moral and
civilized nation could be cultivated and built upon. Of course, the insistence that
the uprising was confined to a small sector of the native infantry was itself fraught
with problems that could only add to the British sense of insecurity and
inadequacy, already smarting from the embarrassment of the early stages of the
Crimean War. If the scale of the revolt had been so minor, then why had it taken
nearly two years to crush the rebels? These tensions in versions of events could
perhaps explain why the British could not leave the Mutiny alone, and were
impelled to endlessly reconfigure what had taken place. According to either
version of events they came out deficient.
Dickens himself had always been sceptical of the greatness of a Britain that
neglected its own citizens in favour of those overseas. Given his despondency at
the general state of human nature throughout the 1850s, the uncomfortable
analogies between the ferocity of the sepoys and the brutality of the British would
not have come as a surprise to him, and he would not have felt challenged by them.
A Tale of Two Cities shows that those who have been treated as animals (whether
they be French peasants or Indian soldiers) by the class that should have been
responsible for them can only be expected to respond as animals. Notwithstanding
Dickens's understanding of human behaviour, the wider ideological restructuring
process revealed a less enlightened approach, grounded largely in fear and
resulting from attempts to disavow the presence of the self in the other. Homi
Bhabha has pointed out that the act of disavowing, 'always exacerbates the edge of
identification, reveals that dangerous place where identity and aggressivity are
twinned. For denial is always a retroactive process; a half acknowledgement that
otherness has left its traumatic mark'.24 In other words, as the very act of
attempting to deny the uncomfortable similarities between the reprisals of the
British and the behaviour of the Indians gained increased urgency, so the British
managed only to reinforce the similarities. They protested too much, and in doing
so created the type of tension depicted by Forster and Paul Scott, whereby the
identity of the British settler in India is inextricably bound up with his or her
authority over the 'natives'. Hence, the reconfigured power relations led only to
feelings of guilt and mistrust, along with—for the white colonial—a fear of
becoming 'one of them'.
Many of the alterations related solely to external appearances, such as the
redesigning of the uniform for the native infantry. After 1860 all Indian soldiers
wore dress uniforms that consisted of sashes and turbans in place of the
westernized uniforms they had been issued with before the revolt. As Hobsbawm
and Ranger have expressed it, 'Indians now had to look like Indians'.25 However,
the othering process was not simply restricted to dress. It was no longer a case of
'turn white or disappear', as Bhabha would put it (after Fanon), but rather 'turn
white at your peril'. The English self was increasingly defined against the Indian
other, the latter having been reduced to the status of a mere savage in the Mutiny's
immediate aftermath. Legitimized by the type of interpretations grafted onto
Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), racism became a defensive strategy in
articulating and constructing difference. Although Darwin had painstakingly
avoided the human implications of his theories, the type of anxieties regarding the
origin of the race that had been elicited by Sir Charles Lyell's work and Robert
Knox's assertions that race or hereditary descent is everything, were soon
projected onto Darwin's. Hence, it was now possible to reclassify 'scientifically'
the Indians as a 'lesser' race, one that according to the doctrine of what was later
termed the 'survival of the fittest' was sure to die out. While the Great Exhibition
Catalogue had suggested that India was a once-great civilization in stasis, the
Indians were now re-assessed as an inferior race, not yet developed, and which,
lacking the necessary vigour to sustain and regenerate itself, was likely to
disappear altogether before it had a chance to do so. As Richard Dyer has
commented, 'British ideological investment in race categories increased in
response to spectacular resistance to its Empire, notably the Indian Mutiny of 1857
and the Jamaican revolt of 1865'.28 The Indian who in the past was believed
capable of assimilation through learning now became a figure of fun like Kipling's
often ridiculous babu in Kim (1901), as differences rather than similarities between
the cultures were emphasized.
Given Dickens's support of the South in the American Civil War, it is
tempting to entertain the notion that his view of other races had been irrevocably
altered in 1857. He may have abandoned his calls to obliterate the sepoys from the
face of the earth, yet his 'support' for the disgraced Governor Eyre in 1865 is
frequently invoked as evidence of a sustained racism. His interest in the
evolutionary debate certainly indicated a receptiveness to the re-classification
process in India and there is no evidence that Dickens felt threatened by any of the
theories under discussion. Indeed, as the Megalosaurus at the beginning of Bleak
House attests, the idea that giant lizards once ruled the earth seems to have
appealed to his imagination. While Punchy rather predictably, ran several
'monkey's uncle' illustrations as a way of making light of what was for many the
terrifying thought that humanity could be descended from apes, All the Year Round
ran a number of articles on natural history at the beginning of the 1860s. The
journal's precise stance on the issue is difficult to determine, in spite of its
conductor's apparent nonchalance. Articles like 'Our Nearest Relation' of May
1859 manifest anxiety at man's proximity to a brute beast that, when contrasted
with the achievement of other animals, would seem to be at the bottom of the chain
of being:
Again and again it strikes the fancy—strikes deeper than the fancy—that the
honey-making architectural bee, low down in the scale of life, with its
insignificant head, its little boneless body, and gauzy wing, is our type of
industry and skill: while this apex in the pyramid of the brute creation, this
near approach to human form, what can it do? The great hands have no skill
but to clutch and strangle; the complex brain is kindled by no divine spark;
there amid the unwholesome luxuriance of a tropical forest, the creature can
do nothing but pass its life in fierce sullen isolation—eat drink, and die?29
The piece's author is clearly too challenged by his connection to 'the most
repulsive and ferocious of all apekind' to consider the racial arguments of his
subject, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) in any depth.30 Coincidentally, the piece is
juxtaposed with another article calling for the decoration of Sir John Lawrence for
his management of the Punjab in spite of the 'fierce tribes, waiting the hour to
spring', which surrounded it.31 The bulk of the piece on gorillas is, though, spent
arguing that human habits are more akin to those of virtually any other animal than
the gorilla, perhaps as a means of dealing with the fear generated by the notion of
what Tennyson would term 'Reel[ing] back into the beast'.32 Other pieces,
however, are less daunted by the natural history debates and the author of
'England, Long and Long Ago' finds inspiration through the geological
discoveries.33 The article consists largely of a series of descriptions of how
England looked when mammoths roamed and 'painted savages' were its only
inhabitants. Implicit in a number of the piece's assertions is the notion that
English civilization has moved on. Man is referred to as a 'powerful and highly-
gifted creature', and rather incongruously—and apparently unironically—the
Armstrong gun and the controversial Enfield rifle are cited as evidence of human
progress. Given the widespread publicity surrounding the use of the Enfield rifle
in India, this reference would be bound to evoke recollections of the Mutiny.
Since the sepoys had refused to use the rifle with its greased cartridges, the
implication may be drawn that the Indians had not yet attained this criterion of
civilization.
Interpretations of Darwin's theories may have offered scientific justification
for the racism provoked by the Mutiny. However, there is little racial prejudice
surrounding India to be detected in the pages of All the Year Round in the early
1860s. Rather astonishingly, when set against Dickens's attitudes of just three
years before, an article appeared in October 1861 written by an otherwise
anonymous 'educated Hindu'. Even more surprising is the fact that it explicitly
criticized European mismanagement in India. 'Cotton Cultivation in Bengal9 was
one of a series of reports on the need to invest in the Indian cotton industry. One
reason for this rapid about-face was the poverty that would have ensued for the
men and women employed in the British textile industry would certainly have
influenced Dickens. He was definitely aware of the economic importance of India
in the early 1860s, and All the Year Round carried a number of articles calling for
investment in Indian cotton plantations. Interest in Indian cotton cultivation was
widespread by this time with the realization that war in North America would leave
cotton mills in England without supplies in event of a blockade against the
Confederate states.34 What makes 'Cotton Cultivation in Bengal' particularly
radical is not only its assertion that 'Europeans must take more responsibility if the
English cotton trade is to flourish', but also its insistence that the educated Indian
should not be dismissed.35 The author reasons:
Employ educated natives, and ten to one they will prove themselves faithful to
their employers and the ryots. Give them decent salaries, and in the long run
they will prove to be cheap...their honesty and integrity will amply
compensate for their lack of local knowledge, which they will soon acquire.
Such employments will render the educated natives, the alumni of colleges
and schools, far more useful to their country than they can now possibly be.
The structure of this article is particularly clever. The reader is presented with a
series of well-reasoned and articulate arguments, similar in tone to the pre-revolt
writings of John Capper. It is left until the close of the piece for the author to
declare his identity as, 'one of the Hindoo race, who confidently hopes and
believes that if British capitalists will adopt proper methods for the raising of
cotton in India, they will not only be able to invest their capital profitably to
themselves, but they will also be the instruments of conferring lasting benefits
upon the people of that country'.37 Having lured the reader into assuming that s/he
is reading the thoughts of an Englishman, the writer then skilfully stresses that
improvement of the system will also be beneficial to the British, before he outlines
how his proposals will improve the quality of Indian lives. Its very presence in the
periodical is extraordinary, and testifies to the rapidity with which Dickens was
able to reconfigure his opinions.
While Dickens may have resisted the move to redefine the Indians, he was
certainly complicit in the re-assembly of the British sense of identity, which is a
key reason behind the endless need to reinvent the revolt as a tale of military
triumph. In his speech of 27 July, 1857, Disraeli had spoken of the fact that, 'our
conquest of India, in the main, has been a conquest of India only in the same sense
in which William of Orange conquered England'.38 In other words,
notwithstanding Clive's victory at Plassey one hundred years before, India had
been acquired in fits and starts, and there was no overriding moment of conquest to
enable the British to assert their triumph. The suppression of the rebellion offered
a new opportunity to create a single moment of conquest, which in Darwinian
terms would point to the vigour of the British and their fitness to rule over the
Indians forever. Since the Mutiny itself was only put down in stages, narrative
accounts accentuating British strength, valour and victories assumed an important

role in re-shaping the rulers' self-image. It is curious that as poet laureate,
Tennyson waited until 1878—two years after Victoria had been crowned Empress
of India—to commemorate the Mutiny with 'The Defence of Lucknow', a
celebration of victory, rather than penning a memorial to the women of Cawnpore
in the 1850s. The distance of the years, however, allowed Tennyson to respond
less emotionally than he is likely to have done in 1857. Particularly significant is
his spirited declaration:
Praise to our Indian brothers, and let the dark face have his due!
Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful and
few,
Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote
them, and slew,
That ever upon the topmost roof our banner in India blew.39
Instead of dwelling on native treachery, Tennyson emphasizes the co-operation of
many Indians, whilst simultaneously othering their 'dark' faces. The accounts
from Cawnpore are alluded to only as a 'whisper', and in the light of the wilful
interpretation of the insurrection as a mutiny it is hardly surprising that Tennyson
opted to depict a campaign more militaristic in nature.
To an extent, Dickens—albeit unwittingly—did become involved in this
process of reasserting British superiority of character and moral fibre as early as A
Tale of Two Cities (1859). The reasons behind his need to revise are typically
complex, as although he was certainly not a nationalist, he nonetheless seems to
have been anxious to see the white man vindicated. Perhaps the most significant
evidence of his revisionism may be found by analyzing two scenes from the novel
in relation to two well-known illustrations of the 1850s. The first is when the
recurring noise of footsteps marking changes in Lucie Manette's life, (such as her
pregnancy, or the recalling to life of her father after his imprisonment) now takes a
new and more sinister twist. Up until this point, Lucie's home in Soho has been
depicted as an enclave, detached from the unpleasantness of the outside world. In
Soho, Dr Manette can, for a while, bury his past, and even the dissolute Sidney
Carton can find some semblance of happiness. However, shortly after a discussion
between Charles Darnay and the lawyer, Jarvis Lorry about the 'gloomy and
threatening' sky, representing the revolutionary activity brewing in France, the
footsteps assume a wider frame of reference:
Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's
life, footsteps not easily made clean again, if once stained red, the footsteps
raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London
window. [7C204]
Here, the solipsistic sanctuary of the Darnay household is threatened by events in
the public sphere. The noise of the footsteps becomes analogous to the rumblings
of discontent in India in the early months of 1857. Even more telling, though, are
the parallels between Dickens's description of the revolution's impingement upon
Lucie's domestic happiness and an engraving of 1858, entitled 'English Homes in
India 1857' [See Figure 7.3]. The illustration depicts a woman in her home in
India, nursing a baby and with another infant at her side, being menaced by a pair
of extremely bloodthirsty-looking sepoys. Apart from the cane blind and the
distinctly un-English vegetation outside the window, the room could almost be in
England itself. Of course, the artist's point in transferring this quintessentially
English d6cor to India is to demonstrate how the atrocities, actual and alleged,
committed against the memsahibs constituted violations not only of their bodies,
but also of the imperial body politic. Significantly, the description of the sound of
footsteps appears about halfway through the novel (published in serial form from
30 April 1859 until 26 November of the same year in All the Year Round),
demonstrating that at this stage, Dickens was still trying to resolve his feelings
towards the sepoys. Dickens's stance had, though, certainly shifted since his hot-
headed outbursts of 1857. At the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities Charles
Darnay's trial for espionage calls the infallibility of English justice into question in
a manner which Dickens's letter to Emile de la Rue of October 1857, calling for
vengeance, could not admit. The parallels between the uprising in France and the
North American bid for independence of 1776 are also far more explicit here than
in 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners'. Indeed, in comparing France to the
American colonies and conceding through Darnay that the 'quarrel' between
Britain and America was 'a wrong and foolish one on England's part' [TC 67],
Dickens is perhaps also referring, albeit obliquely, to Britain's equally wrong and
foolish behaviour in India. Thus, the Indian subtext of A Tale of Two Cities
actually becomes a site on which a number of conflicting responses can be aired
and, to a degree, resolved.
The second example comes from the novel's closing pages, and demonstrates
how Dickens himself became engaged in revising narratives of the rebellion. The
final encounter between Miss Pross and Madame Defarge seems to recall accounts
of Miss Ulrika Wheeler defending herself against the mutineers, which entered
circulation late in 1857. Miss Wheeler was the daughter of General Sir Hugh
Wheeler, who had been the commander-in-chief at Cawnpore before it was
captured by the sepoys. What Miss Wheeler actually did is rather difficult to
determine, since accounts were embellished and many reports conflict with one
another. However, several sources suggest that having berated the sepoys for their
treachery against her father and the English in general, along with their cowardice
in taking women as hostages, Miss Wheeler killed several Indians whilst defending
her honour. In one version she shot them with a revolver, in another she slew them
with a sword, before hurling herself down a well in order to escape violation.40
Miss Wheeler became an almost iconic figure of the Mutiny, embodying the purity
and bravery of the British woman, who would rather die than give her body up to
be violated. Metonymically, she also represents the heroism of the British men
who would sacrifice their own lives in an attempt to keep hold of an India also,
interestingly, frequently imaged as a female body. To a degree, Miss Wheeler's
body is over-determined and becomes a site of so many conflicting symbolisms
that she is unable to carry them all, but her story did, nonetheless, enter Mutiny
mythology. By 1865, though, the legend was beginning to be challenged as
allegations began to circulate suggesting Miss Wheeler was in fact alive and living
with a Muslim man. Even though both the Wheeler family ayah and a pro-British
spy named Myoor Tewaree testified to having seen Miss Wheeler's sacrifice, the
historian George Trevelyan led the way in challenging the authenticity of what had
become a Mutiny myth. According to Trevelyan, writing in 1865, it was Ulrika
Wheeler's kidnapper/rescuer Ali Khan who:
[C]ontrived to spread a report that his victim flung herself down a well, after
killing her captor, his wife, and his three children. His device met with
extraordinary success. In Hindostan it is never a very difficult matter to find
witnesses who will swear to anything; and before long, a private in the Second
began to remember that he had been passing his comrade's door when Miss
Wheeler came out, with a sword in her hand, and said: "Go in and see how
nicely I have rubbed the Corporal's feet". Another individual, blessed with an
elastic memory, had been present at the dragging of the well, and had seen
"Missy Baba taken out, dead and swollen". The impudent fabrication was
generally accepted in the city and the cantonments, and met with ready
credence in England, where the imaginations of men were excited by a series
of prurient and ghastly fictions. Under one shape or another the incident long
went the round of provincial theatres, and sensation magazines, and popular
lectures illustrated with dissolving views. Meanwhile the poor girl went on
living under a Mohammedan name.41
Trevelyan neatly reveals the ways in which rumour and exaggeration rapidly
spiralled out of control, creating a series of stories that, while emphasizing the
horrors suffered by the allegedly 'violated' women, also sought to uphold the
notion of a uniquely British valour. The Miss Wheeler who valiantly slays her
would be assailants is decidedly a British heroine, to be lauded on the stage and in
popular journals. The Miss Wheeler who is discovered several years later
cohabiting with a Muslim is rapidly stripped of her British identity. She is
declared to be 'by no means of pure English blood', as, according to mid-Victorian
expectations no virtuous English woman would ever allow herself to be
'contaminated' in such a way.42 Indeed, as Jenny Sharpe has remarked, 'The
woman who was once a heroic English lady and true soldier's daughter is now
revealed to be Eurasian. In other words, her racial construction changes to the
precise degree that her badge of honour is now a sign of her disgrace...what
determines her membership to the English race is less her class or racial origin than
her "choice" of death over dishonour; female moral fortitude is the sign of racial
purity'.43 It would appear, then, that English identity was considered mutable and
not merely dependent upon birth, but also the embracing of a strict moral code.
Dickens loosely reworks Miss Wheeler's defence of her honour in the closing
pages of A Tale of Two Cities. The scene of Miss Pross's confrontation with
Madame Defarge recalls the construction of a 'Judith' of Cawnpore in the form of
Ulrika Wheeler. Madame Defarge, who has been compared to a tiger throughout
the novel assumes the role of the Hussani Khanum, known as the Begum, who,
according to contemporary accounts incited the atrocities committed against the
English women in Cawnpore through casting aspersions on the sepoys'
masculinity. Defarge herself frequently chides her husband for the weakness she
perceives in his loyalty to Dr Manette and we learn of her particular viciousness

when Dickens depicts her rallying the women, prior to the storming of the Bastille:
"To me, women!" cried Madame..."What! We can kill as well as the men
when the place is taken!" And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women
variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and revenge. [TC 205]
At this stage, Madame's fury is shown to be understandable, in the light of the
social inequalities between the first and third estates that Dickens has taken care to
stress. Yet her desire for vengeance spirals out of control when we see her dogged
persecution of Lucie and her children for the sole reason that they are the kin of
Evremonde. Through repeated declarations like, 'I am an Englishwoman' [TC
348] and her references to Madame Defarge as, 'you wicked foreign woman'
[TC 349], Miss Pross identifies herself with intrinsically English courage,
emphasizing her opponent's otherness at the same time. However, it is in her
spirited refusal to allow Madame to see whether Lucie and the children have
escaped that Miss Pross truly epitomizes the values of bravery and self-sacrifice
initially ascribed to Miss Wheeler and the other women of Cawnpore. She asserts:
I am a Briton.. .1 am desperate. I don't care an English Twopence for myself.
I know that the longer I keep you here, the greater hope there is for my
Ladybird. I'll not leave a handful of that dark hair upon your head, if you lay
a finger on me! [TC349]
Unlike the increasingly masculine Madame Defarge, Miss Press's valour remains
inextricably bound to her femininity, as we learn that 'her courage was of that
emotional nature that it brought the irrepressible tears into her eyes'. [TC 349] At
this moment, Miss Pross seems to embody the self-sacrificing love and honour that
came to typify depictions of the mothers and daughters who died at Cawnpore.
Importantly, she alludes to Defarge's darkness, which suggests that she may also
be read as representing the sepoys—a parallel reinforced by Madame Defarge's
pronouncement, 'I will tear you to pieces, but I will have you from that door' [TC
350].
Dickens's re-enactment is far more complex than an allegorical replication of
the popular image of the revolver-wielding Miss Wheeler fending off murderous
Indians depicted in Charles Ball's 1858 History of the Indian Mutiny [See Figure
7.4]. Miss Pross resists her attacker and, although willing to give up her life to
save her 'Ladybird', she defends herself to the hilt, shooting Madame Defarge
dead. By 1859, then, Dickens is able to envisage a less drastic fate for the spirited
woman. Instead of hurling herself to the bottom of a well, Miss Pross is
sufficiently resourceful to make good her escape and avoid detection. However,
the description Dickens offers of her appearance bears a remarkable similarity to
the dishevelled state of a rape survivor:
By good fortune she had a veil on her bonnet, or she could hardly have gone
along the streets without being stopped. By good fortune, too, she was
naturally so peculiar in appearance as not to show disfigurement like any other
woman. She needed both advantages, for the marks of griping fingers were
deep in her face, and her hair was torn, and her dress (hastily composed with
unsteady hands) was clutched and dragged a hundred ways. [TC 351]
With her veil, Miss Pross resembles one of the escapees from the sepoys, who has
disguised herself as an Indian woman in purdah, while the state of her attire marks
her out as a survivor of the Cawnpore massacre. At this point in the novel, though,
Miss Pross actually takes on board a number of identities and becomes a
representative of Anglo-Indian womanhood in its entirety. Through allowing Miss
Pross to assert herself, but still survive, Dickens complicates and overturns the
conceptions of the fragility of British womanhood that characterized reports of the
massacre at the Bibighar. This revisionism marks a key stage in his treatment of
the rebellion, which can also be linked to the wider debate surrounding the re-
establishment of British rule on the subcontinent. If, as I have suggested, the
mutilated female bodies at Cawnpore could be interpreted as metonymic
representations of the imperial holding, itself in danger of being carved up in the
insurrection, then the reconstruction process also had to include a reconfiguring of
the vulnerable woman. The female as analogue to the imperial power could not be
permitted to submit to the violence of the colonized, but must instead be able to
resist and defeat any would-be attacker.
Dickens appears to have unwittingly become involved with what Hobsbawm
and Ranger have suggested is a process of mythologizing the Mutiny, which
emerged with the re-assertion of British control. They observe that,
To the English from 1859 to the early part of the twentieth century, the Mutiny
was seen as a heroic myth embodying and expressing their central values
which explained their rule in India to themselves—sacrifice, duty, fortitude;
above all it symbolized the ultimate triumph over those Indians who had
threatened properly constituted authority and order.44
Dickens had no need to mythologize the rebellion as a victory, and seems to have
been more interested in setting the record straight than in reasserting British
dominance. His revisions do not seem to be linked to any wider ideological
agenda, but are manifestations of his ongoing attempts to make sense of the British
national and imperial identity. The process of re-inventing the rebellion was also
for Dickens a process of re-fashioning himself and his world-view. In spite of his
extraordinarily dynamic thought process, the reconfiguration of his views at the
beginning of the 1860s offered a far, far better stability than he had ever known
before.
Notes
1 Quoted in Jenny Sharpe. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial
Text. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 113
2 Benjamin Disraeli. 'The State of Affairs in India', 27 July, 1857. Hansard's Parliamentary
Debates: Third Series. 20 July, 1857-28 August, 1857. Volume 147. 475.
3 Lawrence James. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. London: Little,
Brown and Company, 1997. 295.
4 Benjamin Disraeli. Hansard's. 444. For responses to Disraeli's speech, see David
Urquhart's tract, The Rebellion of India: Mr Disraeli's Speech Reviewed [1857], along
with his The Wonderful Tale of the Greased Cartridges [1857]. In the latter pamphlet
Urquhart almost seems to allege that the Mutiny was engineered by English Generals
who disregarded orders. He also makes a strong case for the need for future investment
in India, and more importantly, for adjudication.
5 Disraeli. Hansard's. 440.
6 Disraeli. Hansard's. 447. According to Snigdha Sen [see The Historiography of the
Indian Revolt of 1857. Calcutta: Punthi-Pustak, 1992. 160] In the Mutiny's immediate
aftermath, both Hindu and Muslim historians attempted to downplay the role of rebels
of their own respective religious persuasion and to suggest, if Hindu that the Muslims
were largely to blame, and if Muslim that the Hindus were the main inciters of the
agitation.
7 James. Raj. 295.
8 Christopher Hibbert. The Great Mutiny: India 1857. London: Allen Lane, 1978. 388.
9 Canning was widely criticized for his attempts to restrain British forces from retaliating
against the Indian aggressors and, when power was transferred to the Crown in 1858,
he became the first Viceroy of India.
10 Sen. The Historiography of the Indian Revolt of 1857. 136.
11 Quoted in Sen. The Historiography of the Indian Revolt of 1857. 138-9.
12 Sara Suleri. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992. 6.
13 Athena Vrettos. Review: 'Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure
of the Speaking Woman by Claire Kahane'. Victorian Studies. Volume 40, number 4,
Summer 1997. 670.
14 William Howard Russell. My Diary in India in the Year 1858-9. (In two volumes).
London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1860. Volume one, 163.
15 The Illustrated London News. 18 July, 1857. 50
16 'Money or Merit'. All the Year Round. 21 April, 1860. 30-32.
17 See All the Year Round, 28 May, 1859,109-112 and 6 August, 1859, 350-355.
18 'How the Victoria Cross was Won'. 253.
19 'European Mutiny in India'. All the Year Round. July 30, 1859. 324-5.
20 Maire nf Fhlathuin. 'Anglo-India after the Mutiny: the formation and breakdown of
national identity'. [In Stuart Murray (ed.). Not on Any Map: Essays in Postcoloniality
and Cultural Nationalism. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997. 70.].
21 James. Raj. 297.
22 Jane Robinson. Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Viking, 1996. 95.
23 Frederick Roberts. Letters Written During the Indian Mutiny by Fred.Roberts,
Lieutenant, Bengal Horse Artillery & Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General of the
Delhi Field Force. Afterwards Field-Marshall Earl Roberts, V.C., K.G. With a
preface by his daughter, Countess Roberts. London: Macmillan & Co, 1924. 75, my
brackets.
24 Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 62.
25 Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (ed.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:
26 Bhabha. The Location of Culture. 61.
27 An image that was to retain potency beyond Independence in the imaginations of ladies
of the Raj like Forster's newcomer, Adela Quested.
28 Richard Dyer. White. Routledge: London and New York, 1997. 127.
29 'Our Nearest Relation'. All the Year Round. 28 May, 1859. 114-115.
30 'Our Nearest Relation'. 112.
31 'An Empire Saved'. All the Year Round. 28 May, 1859. 112.
32 Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Idylls of the King: "The Passing of Arthur'. Tennyson: A
Selected Edition. Ed. Christopher Ricks. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1989. 960. Line 26. My brackets.
33 'England, Long, Long Ago'. All the Year Round. 7 April, 1860. 562.
34 For example see 'Cotton Fields', December 7, 1861. 256-260.
35 'Cotton Cultivation in Bengal'. All the Year Round. 19 October, 1861. 92.
36 'Cotton Cultivation in Bengal'. 92.
37 'Cotton Cultivation in Bengal'. 92.
38 Hansard's. 446.
39 Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 'The Defence of Lucknow'. Poems and Plays. 1953. Ed. T.
Herbert Warren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 483.
40 See The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expeditions to Persia and China 1856-
7-8. London: Chambers, 1859, particularly 139-140.
41 George Trevelyan. Cawnpore. 1865. Macmillan's Colonial Library. London and
New York, 1894. 193
42 Trevelyan. Cawnpore. 193.
43 Sharpe. Allegories of Empire. 73.
44 Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds). The Invention of Tradition. 179.
Chapter 8
The 1860s and the Decline of the

Discourse
'The Jamaican story, is characteristic of the beastliness of the 'true
Englishman".1
By the 1860s the new journal All the Year Round's stance on India had been
radically reconfigured from that of its predecessor, Household Words. The amount
of column space given to India certainly did not diminish, but the tone of the
articles reverted to that of many of the pre-Mutiny essays. Indeed, in terms of their
emphasis on the need to ameliorate conditions for the Indian peasantry there is
little to differentiate the writings of the early 1850s from the articles appearing in
the 1860s. The latter pieces, however, are informed by an urgent need to invest in
the Indian cotton industry to ensure that textile production in areas like Lancaster
could be maintained in spite of the war in America. It is for this reason that the
majority of post-1859 articles dealing with India do not refer to the revolt, and bear
none of the animosity that characterized the pieces written in the uprising's early
stages. Depicting a volatile political climate and an insubordinate people would
hardly encourage investment from businessmen expecting a sizeable return on their
capital.
The call for expenditure to modernize cotton cultivation in India was hardly a
new one, nor was the link between the development of the Indian plantations and
the decline of those in America. As early as May 1852 Professor Calvin Stowe
(husband of the novelist so disdained by Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe) had
called upon an abolitionist meeting at Exeter Hall to adopt a course more effective
than impassioned rhetoric and petitioning, and to actively boycott American
cotton. He continued by observing that either India or Africa would furnish
alternative supplies in abundance, although at the time it was neither politically nor
economically expedient for Britain to adopt this policy of alienating North
America.2 There is no evidence to suggest that Dickens considered the potential
for the export of Indian cotton in the 1850s—indeed, he is unlikely to have given
serious attention to any course of action advocated by the Stowes. Yet by
November 1862 he was displaying downright irritation at Britain's failure to
maximize her Indian resources in response to the American Civil War. His
instructions to his assistant W.H. Wills with regard to the editing of a paper on
cotton reveal Dickens's continued belief in his journal as a vehicle to push forward
reforms:
15 8 Dickens and Empire
In cutting the cotton paper to such dimensions as you can find room for, take
nothing out of the first slip. Because the Manchester School deserves all the
schooling it can get, touching its reduction to the grossest absurdity of the
supply-and-demand dogmatism and its pig-headed reliance on men's not-
going to war against their interest. As if the vices and passions of men had not
been running counter to their interests since the Creation of the World.3
Dickens's concern here is undoubtedly with the unemployed, politically restless
workforce, and the agitation he knew would ensue from a cotton famine in
Lancaster, rather than with any kind of concern for the needs of the Indian people.
Equally, his campaign did not arise from a commitment to the liberation of the four
million slaves, whose miserable conditions had shocked him so greatly on his first
American tour in the 1840s. While Dickens may have felt some compassion for
the unemployed British labourer, his campaign derived from a far more pragmatic
fear of a repetition of some of the mass demonstrations of the hungry forties. In
attempting to ensure that the flow of raw materials to the mills continued, Dickens
was, therefore, attempting to stem the tide of working-class unrest.
This entwinement of domestic and foreign affairs offers an important model
for the interaction between events at home and abroad in the 1860s. Bernard
Semmel has neatly encapsulated the intricate links between foreign and domestic
events with his notion of an "interdependence of British imperial and domestic
polities' and his sense of an analogous relationship between the working classes of
Britain and the colonized subordinate races.4 According to Semmel, this
interdependence is particularly notable in the 1860s, with the impact of the
American Civil War sounding repercussions down the decade and determining
responses to important political events. In addition to its effects on the lives of
British factory workers, Semmel argues convincingly that the reconstruction
process and the reconfiguration of the place of the former slave in American
society influenced reactions to the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. Thus, those
who were appalled at the notion of black enfranchisement reacted more strongly to
the Jamaican uprising against the British plantocracy than they might otherwise
have done. In turn, the British working-class support for die prosecution of
Governor Edward Eyre for his extreme measures to quell the uprising resulted
from radical orators like John Bright identifying the status of the Jamaican with
that of industrial proletariat. Equally, with widespread working-class agitation for
the franchise, publications like Punch began to view the class debate in racialized
terms. The politically active proletariat and the increasingly restless Irish were
therefore aligned with rebellious 'lower' (for which read non-white) races who
were, more and more, depicted as both savage and barbarous.
The 1860s was just as turbulent a decade as the 1850s, but Dickens responded
to events in a very different, and much calmer, way. Along with the Indian
Mutiny, the Jamaican insurrection of 1865 became one of the most controversial
race-related incidents of the nineteenth century. Coinciding as it did with both the
ethnography debate between the polygenecists (who believed that mankind was
descended from several different species) and monogenecists (who claimed that all
humans shared ancestry from one original couple) and the reconfiguration of race
The 1860s and the Decline of the Discourse 159
relations in the reconstructed American South, the event elicited vehement

responses from both supporters and detractors of Governor Edward Eyre. The
uprising in Morant Bay was just one of a string of rebellions to pepper the history
of British involvement in the Caribbean, probably, as Gad Heuman has argued, as
a result of the high ratio of slaves (or, by 1865, ex-slaves) to white masters.5 The
first slave revolt had occurred in 1673, and by the eighteenth century, according to
Mary Turner, revolts took place on average once every five years.6 Unsuccessful
plots had been discovered in 1823 and 1824, while on 27 December, 1831 up to
20,000 slaves rose up in the last major rebellion before the abolition of slavery.
The turbulence did not abate with abolition, indeed, it often arose in response to
fears that slavery would be re-established. There were riots in 1839, 1848 and
1859, yet none of them was put down as brutally as at Morant Bay, and certainly,
none of them had the same impact upon such a broad cross-section of the British
public.
Most of the nineteenth-century unrest in Jamaica involved damage to property
only. However, the second of the two disturbances of 1859 was less restrained and
did involve bloodshed. The riot was sparked by the arrest of a man of mixed race,
Theodore Buie, along with a number of his supporters, in response to a desire on
the part of Buie's white Scottish aunt to evict him from the Florence Hall Estate,
where he lived. The sixty prisoners taken were released by a large, violent crowd
before they could be brought to trial, and the Falmouth police station continued to
be stoned even after they had been freed. When police fired on the crowd, two
women were killed instantly and another person died from wounds several days
later. In addition, eight or nine others were wounded. As Heuman points out, the
events were even more politically charged by the fact that they took place on 1
August, the twenty-first anniversary of the granting of full freedom to former
slaves. He argues that this uprising, although insignificant to the British public at
the time, may be read as a precursor of the more bloody events six years later:
The riots of 1859 highlighted some of the issues that profoundly affected post-
emancipation Jamaica and would prove crucial six years later at Morant Bay.
High taxes [the cause of the first riot in 1859], whether in the form of
assessments or of toll-gates, were a serious problem for the mass of the
people, especially as the Legislature had shifted a heavy proportion of the
taxes onto the ex-slaves and away from the plantocracy. The lack of justice,
which was an important element in the Buie case, was one of the leading
factors in the outbreak at Morant Bay.7
This absence of justice heightened racial tensions by demonstrating that the legal
system was far from impartial and was in place, not to guarantee law and order for
all, but to protect the economic interests of white settlers and their descendants.
While these events may have paved the way to Morant Bay, they were certainly
not regarded with any particular significance in the mother country when they took
place.
The regular succession of easily quelled revolts does not appear to have had
any effect whatsoever on Dickens, who seems to have regarded the West Indies in
the same way as he perceived Australia. The Caribbean was a useful place to exile
problematic characters in need of a swift change of fortune, as exemplified by

Walter Gay in Dombey and Son—it could also provide a plausible source of wealth
and refuge for characters like Monks/Leeford in Oliver Twist.* Paul Sharrad argues
that whilst Monks's association with the Caribbean is illustrative of the moral
degeneracy that Dickens identified with the slave-owning colony, the 'shadowy but
inarticulated' presence of the West Indies reveals an early sign of the limitations in
Dickens's sympathies toward non-white races.9 As Sharrad observes, 'Dickens's
later condemnation of slavery in the emotive tales with which he castigates the
oppression of London's deserving poor accuses his audience of double standards,
but his basic rationale for opposing the barbarities of institutionalized slavery is
that it corrupts the whites involved in it, and therefore demeans white civilization
as a whole'.10 Compelling though Sharrad's argument is, it is rather reductive of
Dickens's opposition to slavery in the 1830s. Although Monks undoubtedly
belongs to a tradition of the 'imperial gothic' whereby his evil is identified with his
otherness, to suggest that Dickens is only concerned with the moral implications
for the white man is to undermine his essential compassion for all human suffering.
Sharrad attempts to display contempt towards black people in the 1830s, by citing
references to 'a rascally bunch of Negurs' in correspondence that was not penned
until 1865.11 He continues to insinuate that an absence of references to the
abolitionist crusade in letters written before Oliver Twist (1837-8) and fall
abolitionism in the colonies reveals some kind of indifference to the plight of the
slave. In fact, both Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers abound with
allusions to the abolitionist cause. Some of these references are, admittedly,
negative, in that they suggest the need to focus upon white slaves closer to home
before looking overseas. However, even satirical accounts like 'Our Parish'—
showing the cause becoming more attractive after a missionary has imitated a
dialogue between two slaves—demonstrate an interest in the issue and a concern
that the public may not be committing to it for the right reasons. The distress that
Dickens revealed in his brief foray into the American South in the 1840s is surely
evidence of his genuine abhorrence for the institution.
In 1859 the pages of Household Words were far too concerned with a re-
assessment of its editor's stance on events in India to be caught up with what
seemed to be a relatively insignificant uprising in Jamaica. The unrest at Morant
Bay was, in itself, not remarkably different from any of the other demonstrations
that had, by the very nature of the inequality between the two groups, characterized
black-white relations both before and after emancipation. It was not the uprising
itself that was responsible for the considerable controversy to dominate public
debate from 1865 to 1868, but rather the manner of its suppression. In brief, the
immediate catalyst for the activity was, just as in 1859, a court case, although
relations between the planters and the former slaves had been particularly tense for
some time, largely as a result of a long period of economic depression. Over the
previous ten years Jamaica had been subject to epidemics of cholera and smallpox;
both drought and floods had affected crops, and many sugar planters had been
bankrupted. The American Civil War had exacerbated the situation since 1861, as
cheap food imports from the U.S. were no longer available, thus leading to higher
prices. Blockades of Southern ports also prevented the importing of American

cotton garments. As Thomas C. Holt has noted,
By 1865 not only had the cost of cotton trebled but osnaburgh, the hempen
substitute that had clothed workers since slavery had more than doubled in
price. The price of fish doubled. Cornmeal went up as much as 75 per cent.
Flour was up 83 per cent.. .According to one recent calculation the overall cost
of living on the island rose 60 per cent between 1859-61 and 1865.12
So appalling had living conditions become, that in February 1865 the Secretary of
the Baptist Missionary Society of Great Britain, Dr Edward Bean Underbill, who
had visited the island in 1859 to study the standard of living, wrote to the British
Colonial Office to draw attention to the plight of the Jamaicans. It was left to
Edward Eyre (who had been appointed Governor of the island the year before,
having been acting Governor since 1862) to respond to this letter, which he did in
an extremely public and insensitive manner. Rather than conceding that problems
existed, Eyre repudiated all of Underbill's allegations and took no steps to improve
conditions. The planters of the St Ann district responded by circulating a petition
to the Queen, complaining of their impoverished state and requesting that crown
lands be opened up to the peasantry to allow them to cultivate food. Eyre passed
the letter to the Colonial Office, along with a number of his own unfavourable
observations on the sloth of the Jamaican and what he regarded as Underbill's
subversive intentions. The resulting reply, known as The Queen's Advice, was
penned by Henry Taylor of the Colonial Office, who seems to have been woefully
ignorant of the hardships suffered in Jamaica and to have unquestioningly accepted
Eyre's repudiations. Taylor's response—neatly described by Holt as taking the
form of 'a lecture in classical political economy'—failed to engage with any of the
complaints put forward by the petitioners and urged the people to work harder,
instead of depending upon the charity of others.13 Eyre had this deeply insensitive
and factually inaccurate reply reproduced and displayed across the island. It was,
however, widely believed that the Queen would not have permitted such a letter to
be written in her name unless she had been severely misled, and it was speculated
that Eyre was the guilty party.14
Eyre's actions generated further unrest across the island and heightened
resentment against the plantocracy, who were adamant that crown lands would not
be turned over to the people. After a period of political rallying—much of which
took place in Native Baptist chapels and meeting houses—rebellion erupted on 11
October 1865 when several hundred people attacked the police station at Morant
Bay following a court case four days before. The ensuing confrontation between
the local police and the crowd resulted in eighteen deaths in the ranks of the
militia, and a further thirty-one people were wounded. In the next few days two
planters were murdered and many others were threatened, leading Eyre to declare a
state of emergency and to place the district under martial law. At this point, it
would seem that the Governor panicked, and by misjudging what had begun as a
local insurrection—albeit one resulting from more widespread discontent—he
exacerbated the crisis by bringing in troops. In the inevitable clashes that followed
this act, nearly five hundred people were killed. Reports filtering back to Britain
rather exaggerated the figures, with Lyons' Newspaper observing,
It is supposed that in little more than a week, more than 2000 people have
been either shot or hung, whilst the number flogged is enormous. It is
commonly reported that more than 300 women and young girls have been
catted.15
A writer to the Birmingham Post's letters column went even further by
questioning Eyre's judgment on 13 November 1865, just ten days after his dispatch
requesting military assistance was received in London:
No one attempts to do anything but condemn the savage outbreak; yet none of
us can believe there was a wide-spread intention to murder the white and
coloured (people) at Christmas, form a republic, burn Kingston &c, &c. These
are the false and foolish assertions of men who are alarmed, and conjure up to
themselves the most dreadful things.16
Some of the troops involved in putting down the rising had served in India during
the sepoy rebellion, and this factor undoubtedly influenced their behaviour, which
seems to have been tempered by a lust for revenge and a mistrust of the other,
rather than a desire to restore peace. Indeed, the orgy of gratuitous violence
initiated by the British is demonstrated in the following extract from the despatch
of Captain Ford, who commanded the St Thomas-in-the-East Irregular Troops:
On our march from Morant Bay we shot two prisoners and catted five or six,
and released them as these latter were only charged with being concerned in
plundering, not murders. This morning we made raid with thirty men, all
mounted, and got back to head-quarters at four p.m., bringing in a few
prisoners, and having flogged nine men, and burned three negro houses, and
then had a court martial on the prisoners, who amounted to about fifty or
sixty. Several were flogged without court-martial, from a simple examination;
nine were convicted by court-martial: one of them to a hundred lashes, which
he got at once, the other eight to be hanged or shot...This is a picture of
martial law. The soldiers enjoy it—the inhabitants have to dread it. If they
run on their approach they are shot for running away. The contents of all the
houses we have been in, except only this very house, but including the
barracks, have been reduced to a mass of broken and hacked furniture, with
doors and windows smashed by the rebels.17
It is a telling fact that the Jamaica Committee, who wished to prosecute Eyre for
his draconian and reactionary behaviour included this extract in its collection of
Facts and Documents. The behaviour of the troops is marked by a complete
disregard for human suffering, and the account clearly points to the brutality of the
forces of law. Captain Ford's references to the damaged property are obviously
intended to draw attention to the barbarity of the rebels, however, their
juxtaposition with accounts of wholesale floggings simply emphasize the excessive
British conduct.
Eyre himself certainly played upon memories of the recent Indian Mutiny in
an attempt to defend his actions. As he declared to the Jamaican Assembly on
November?, 1865:
One moment's hesitation, one single reverse, might have lit the torch which
would have blazed in rebellion from one end of the island to the other; and
who can say how many of us would have lived to see it extinguished? It is my
duty to point out to you that, satisfactory as it is to know that the rebellion in
the eastern districts has been crushed out, the entire colony has long been, still
is, on the brink of a volcano, which may at any moment burst into fury. There
is scarcely a district or a parish in the island where disloyalty, sedition, and
murderous intentions are not widely disseminated and, in many instances,
openly expressed.18
The reasoned and reasonable observations of the Birmingham Post and Lyons9
offer a direct contrast to Eyre's assertions of savagery and brutality. They also
demonstrate the type of emotional response elicited by the Jamaican controversy,
and when pitted against the latent fears and prejudices against native peoples that
lingered in the wake of the sepoy rebellion, a fierce public debate soon began to
rage in Britain. On the one side, John Stuart Mill, T.H. Huxley, Charles Darwin
and Sir Charles Lyell called for Eyre to be prosecuted as a murderer, whilst on the
other, men like Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin demanded that
he be recognized as a hero. What was already an incredibly complex and
factionalized debate assumed a complicating class dimension with the involvement
of the radical John Bright, and the ensuing alignment of the working classes with
Mill's Jamaica Committee, which was a logical step after their support for the
North during the American Civil War. Fears of working-class unrest were
exacerbated by a demonstration held in Southampton by the working men of the
city to protest against Eyre's reception at a banquet held in his honour, following
his recall to Britain. The debate continued well into 1868, with a Royal
Commission being set up to investigate Eyre's actions and various attempts on the
part of the Jamaica Committee to prosecute him firstly for murder, and then later
for high crimes and misdemeanours.
Having responded so vocally to the uprising of 1857, one might expect
Dickens to have been equally outspoken on the subject of the Morant Bay
Rebellion of 1865, especially with the sensational press coverage the event
attracted. Rumours of a bloodbath abounded, as the Jamaica Papers display:
The Morning Journal says that 'It has been stated in the House of Assembly
that the number of 'rebels' executed under sentence of the courts-martial,
exclusive of those destroyed in the bushes by the soldiers and the maroons,
amount to over 2,000'. We have heard it rumoured that the number actually
destroyed in every way amounts to about 3,000, but we do not vouch for its
correctness.19
Exaggerated though this account is, when compared to stories appearing in reliable
sources like The New York Herald telling of 'EIGHT MILES OF DEAD
BODIES', it seems rather tame.20 These narratives of hysteria were clearly out of
control, and H.L. Malchow draws attention to the parallels—both conscious and
subconscious—between the suppression of events at Morant Bay and the tall
stories that circulated during the Indian Mutiny:
[T]he most available resonance was, of course, that with the presumed sexual
and sadistic depravity of the Indian Mutiny. An actual Indian connection was
perhaps implied in allusions in the press to the fact that since 1860 Indian
"coolies' had been introduced into the West Indies as laborers. Although there
was no suggestion that these had been involved in the revolt, this created the
sense of a general mobility of racial threat throughout the empire.21
Yet Dickens failed to exhibit the same public fury with which he had responded to
events in India. Although his public support for Governor Eyre is frequently cited
as further evidence of a persistent and entrenched racism, Dickens's response to
the unrest in the West Indies was, typically, far more complex. Patrick Brantlinger
and William Oddie have both regarded Dickens's involvement with the Eyre
Defence League as an almost natural progression from his outbursts against the
Indian race in the early stages of the sepoy rebellion. In an attempt to neatly trace
an aversion to non-white races first manifested in "The Niger Expedition' and
sustained throughout his career, the fact that Dickens's involvement with the
league was only nominal is all too conveniently overlooked. Dickens had
surprisingly little to say on the subject of events in Jamaica, and while historians
invariably list him as a supporter of Eyre, his endorsement seems only to have
extended to a signature on a petition. Whereas his anger at the Indian Mutiny had
dominated his correspondence for several months, Dickens refers to the occurrence
at Morant Bay only once in a letter to W.W.F. de Cerjat, with whom he was always
particularly candid. Admittedly, by the 1860s Dickens's correspondence was less
voluminous than in previous decades. Having burned all the letters he had ever
received on September 3, 1860, he was becoming increasingly self-conscious
about what he consigned to paper and how it might be used or abused by future
biographers. Overall, though, he was less emotional in his reactions that he had
been in 1857, although, as the de Cerjat letter demonstrates, he remained prone to
accumulate crises and connect them to one another. The letter is worth quoting at
length, since George Ford has referred only to excerpts, thus negating the
cumulative effect of Dickens's rhetoric:
If the Americans don't embroil us in a war before long it will not be their
fault. What with their swagger and bombast, what with their claims for
indemnification, what with Ireland and Fenianism, and what with Canada, I
have strong apprehensions...The Jamaican insurrection is another hopeful
piece of business. That platform—sympathy with the black—or the native, or
the devil—afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at
enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild.
Only the other day, here was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester, to
censure the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting down the
insurrection! So we are badgered about New Zealanders and Hottentots, as if
they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell and were bound by
pen and ink accordingly. So Exeter Hall holds us in mortal submission to
missionaries, who (Livingstone always excepted) are perfect nuisances, and
leave every place worse than they found it.
Of the many evidences that are visible of our being ill-governed, no one is so
remarkable to me as our ignorance of what is going on under our Government.
What will future generations think of that enormous Indian Mutiny being
ripened without suspicion, until whole regiments arose and killed their
officers? A week ago, red tape, half-bouncing and half pooh-poohing what it
bounced at, would have scouted the idea of a Dublin jail not being able to hold
a political prisoner. But for the blacks in Jamaica being over-impatient and
before their time, the whites might have been exterminated without a previous
hint of suspicion that there was anything amiss. Laissez aller, and Britons
never, never, never!22
The letter continues with a series of grumbles about the railway boom and the
influence of shareholders in the companies in the House of Commons. Yet
Dickens almost catches himself slipping into the state of mind which had so nearly
overwhelmed him in the previous decade and ends by observing half-ironically, 'I
seem to be grumbling, but I am in the best of humours'.23 This letter is particularly
interesting in that it demonstrates the interconnectedness of events both across the
Empire and beyond—links that Thomas Carlyle was later to emphasize in his anti-
working-class suffrage tract, Shooting Niagara (1867). It also shows that Dickens
still linked misrule at home to misplaced priorities overseas and an "indifference9
to the English working classes. His language, when discussing the Jamaicans is
certainly derogatory, with its references to 'bloodshed9 and 'savagery9, but when
compared to his previous calls for vengeance, one can see that it has become
comparatively moderate. In addition, as his correspondence attests, by the 1860s
Dickens had become increasingly apolitical and seems no longer to have been able
to respond with the same passion to events not directly affecting him. His
priorities now lay primarily with his reading tours, his deteriorating health, his
writing and, to a lesser extent, with the welfare of his family.
When analyzing the part of the above letter dealing specifically with Jamaica,
George H. Ford stated, 'Dickens is an interesting example. Although he did not
play a prominent part, his views were identical with those of Carlyle. He was one
of the first to applaud Eyre as a hero9.24 Having cited an extract from the letter
dealing specifically with Jamaica, Ford continues,
This was written by the so-called 'friend of the common man9, the great
reformer, the writer whom Macaulay had once considered a dangerous
socialist. It is sometimes forgotten that Dickens was not so much the friend of
the common man as the friend of the common Englishman.25
Ford's assertion that Dickens's views were the same as those of Carlyle is a
curious one, and he offers no evidence to support it, other than some parallels
between Carlyle's 'The Nigger Question9 and Dickens's 'The Noble Savage9.26 In
fact, Dickens's tone in the letter is far less impassioned than that of any of the 1857
correspondence. It is certainly far removed from Carlyle's predestinarian
assertions that both race and class boundaries have been divinely ordained and
should therefore not be tampered with. Carlyle felt able to argue:
One always rather liked the Nigger; evidently a poor blockhead with good
dispositions, with affections, attachments,—with a turn for Nigger Melodies,
and the like:—he is the only Savage of all the coloured races that doesn't die
out on sight of the White Man; but can actually live beside him, and work and
increase and be merry. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a
Servant. Under penalty of Heaven's curse, neither party to this pre-
appointment shall neglect or misdo his duties therein.27
Carlyle's stance may be a difficult one for the modern reader to grasp, but it is a
consistent one with its own peculiar logic, and Ford and his ilk seem to be
challenged by the lack of this kind of consistency in Dickens, a figure so resolute
in every other way. For Carlyle, with his vision of a rigidly ordered hierarchy, it is
the white man with his 'swarmery', or ideas on democracy and equality, who was
ultimately responsible for the bloodbaths in America and Jamaica, and the ensuing
anarchy that he foresaw as the result of working-class suffrage in Britain. He
regards both the Southern slave and the emancipated Jamaican as child-like
workers, who should remain in their divinely prescribed places both for their own
good, and for that of society as a whole. Abhorrent though his arguments may
seem today, one can trace a reasoning to them that is conspicuously absent from
Dickens's sporadic outbursts of prejudice against non-whites. Carlyle evidently
gave a great deal of thought to his chain of being, wherein it was the white man's
duty to ensure that the former slave was forced to continue to work, rather than
succumbing to what he saw as an innate idleness. Dickens, on the other hand, does
not seem to have considered racial issues in any depth: his comments are knee-jerk
reactions, grounded in the rhetoric of scientific racism, but lacking the force of a
coherent argument. By 1865 Dickens's viewpoint was far removed from that of
Carlyle and there is no evidence to suggest that he adopted the type of systematic
racial programme developed by his mentor. It is for this reason perhaps more than
any other that Dickens had virtually nothing to contribute to the debate on
Governor Eyre.
Just as Dickens himself had little to say about the revolt in Jamaica, so All the
Year Round is conspicuous for the paucity of its coverage of an event that had
proved so divisive across all classes in Britain. 'Black is not Quite White', the sole
article to be published on the Eyre controversy appeared on March 3 1866,
although interestingly a short piece on the Indian Mutiny, 'Under Fire' was
published on February 17, 1866.28 The tone of 'Black is not Quite White' is
somewhat deceptive. The article begins by lamenting recent events in Jamaica,
and the author purports to be able to see the argument from both sides:
The late melancholy events in Jamaica have naturally called forth a burst of
feeling; on one side, of sympathy and commiseration for our "poor oppressed
brethren" (whose only crime is their colour); on the other, of wrath and
indignation against a race for which so much has been done, and which has so
ungratefully turned on its benefactors and attempted to destroy them.
Without pretending to prejudge the merits of the late rebellion, or of the means
which were adopted to suppress it—questions which will, no doubt, be fully
and fairly investigated—it may be suggested that both these extreme
expressions of feeling are unreasonable and exaggerated. The first is the result
of a total want of knowledge of the real character of the negro, and the second
arises from the absence of reflection in a moment of excitement as to the

causes which may have produced that character.29
On a superficial level the author may seem to be taking the path of moderation,
with his expressions of sympathy. However, the fact that the words 'poor
oppressed brethren' are placed in quotation marks suggests that the writer is simply
quoting and does not share these sentiments, while the language used to describe
the ingratitude of the race is far more emotive and is, significantly, not reported
speech.
The liberal tone is rapidly dropped after the opening paragraphs, as the author
offers a series of case studies based upon his own experiences in the Caribbean30
These individual character sketches depict a whole host of deceptive Jamaicans
who have attempted to outwit or dupe the writer, and who are shown to have a
strong propensity toward vengeance when detected. The figures depicted bear a
more than passing resemblance to Carlyle's pumpkin-eating Quashee of 'The
Nigger Question', as stock racial stereotypes are brought into play, and the
discourse of scientific racism is employed to argue for a natural inferiority:
Naturally improvident and indolent, he sought a fresh scope for his hereditary
cunning in sharp-witted schemes to meet his wants and gratify his appetites
and vices. When, failing in this he was satisfied barely to exist, he gradually
fell lower and lower in the scale of humanity: not, however, without crying out
against the oppressors who would not feed him in idleness, and not without
repeated attempts at rebellion, in the senseless hope that by murdering those
oppressors and seizing their property he would at last attain the goal of
affluent indolence.31
Having asserted that 'the original African negro is not a high moral type of nature',
the writer goes on to observe that an innate barbarism and duplicity have been
cultivated by the conditions of slavery and servitude to which the Jamaican has
been subjected.32 Although here we see a recognition that the white man is
responsible for these flaws, which have developed in response to conditions of
oppression, the article's author seems unable to acknowledge his own complicity
in the process. Indeed, despite the succession of anecdotes, given as exemplars of
the behaviour of an entire race, at no point does the narrator stop to wonder
whether his servants behave disloyally for the simple reason that he is not a good
master. Some of the conclusions drawn from the 'evidence' offered require rather
a leap of logic on the part of the reader. We are, for instance, given an account of a
dispute between John, a faithful servant, whose sole failing is an inclination to
drink, and Francis, a vicious new cook who arms himself and ambushes John,
apparently without provocation. Having defeated Francis by biting through his
finger, John declares, 'I tank de Lord who give me de victory over my enemy!', at
which point the narrative voice interjects and observes, 'After the butchery at
Morant Bay, is it not recorded that the assassins met together and sang songs of
praise for their victory?'33 This curious juxtaposition of a personal vendetta with
events at Morant Bay is clearly the result of its author's belief that the uprising is
far from an isolated event, but rather the manifestation of a far deeper animosity.
The riots were certainly not a spontaneous outburst, but the result of months and
years of discord. Yet the constant barrage of racial generalizations serves to

undermine the assertion at the beginning of the piece that the behaviour of the
Jamaicans has been shaped by their systematic oppression at the hands of the white
plantocracy. Instead, the black Jamaicans are depicted as hypocritical, bloodthirsty
and volatile, and in spite of initial protestations, responsibility seems to have been
shifted onto the former slaves. Thus, according to the title, morality is reduced to a
manichean allegory whereby skin colour becomes a marker of right or wrong, an
inevitable result of the fact that they are black not quite white.
While it is safe to assume that Dickens did not pen 'Black is not Quite White',
we must conclude from its presence in All the Year Round that he is likely to have
concurred with the views it expounded. There is nothing within the journal's
pages to which the piece may be compared or contrasted, and indeed, All the Year
Round's neglect of the Eyre case is so extraordinary that it warrants a little
speculation. It is possible that by this time of his life Dickens simply no longer
cared about events in far-flung locations like the Caribbean, and that his less-than-
active support for Eyre was backing for Carlyle instead. Nevertheless, the sheer
newsworthiness of the ongoing skirmishes between the Eyre Defence League and
the Jamaica Committee would have warranted a significant number of articles.
Some factor must, therefore, have made Dickens hesitant about becoming
embroiled in the discussion. Although reactions may have been blown out of
proportion by none too distant memories of events in India, there was no
occurrence in Jamaica to match what came to be perceived as the assault on British
womanhood, committed at the Bibighar. Indeed, after his rapid about-face on the
sepoy rebellion in the wake of revelations about British conduct towards Indians,
Dickens would certainly have exercised caution in dealing with so controversial
and divisive a racial issue as the Jamaican uprising in his journal. Finally, from a
business perspective, excessive enthusiasm for, and promotion of, the Eyre
Defence League would easily have alienated a large sector of Dickens's readership
had he used the journal as a platform for championing the former governor.
Bernard Semmel has commented that the divisions on the prosecution of Eyre
were actually already in place before 1865. He regards the American Civil War as
the pivotal event in establishing the two factions, and it is therefore worth briefly
looking backward to examine Dickens's responses to the hostilities. Like many
members of the middle class, Dickens took the side of the South. Although it is
tempting to read his support as an inevitable progression along the way from his
outbursts against the sepoys in the late 1850s, to his support for Eyre in 1865, his
championing of the Southern states resulted from his belief in free trade, rather
than a desire to see slavery upheld. He wrote, with a good deal of political
astuteness, to his friend W.W.F. de Cerjat in March 1862:
I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality
nothing on earth to do with it, in any kind of association with any generous or
chivalrous sentiment on the part of the North. But the North having gradually
got to itself the making of the laws and the settlement of the Tariffs, and
having taxed the South most abominably for its own advantage, began to see,
as the country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical
line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily
recover its old political power and be able to help itself in the adjustment of
commercial affairs. Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the
North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that
sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated abolitionists and derided
them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there is not a pin to choose between
the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a
compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out
of it, just as it happens.34
In other words, for Dickens, those who reduced the war to a question of Abolition
were mere humbugs seeking support for the North and using the slave as a political
pawn. What is also clear from this extract, is that at this time Dickens held a keen
interest in developments in America and was well acquainted with the debates
surrounding the conflict. In the early 1860s he had been deeply depressed by the
prospect of a war, viewing it in catastrophic terms and writing with feeling to his
American friend Captain Morgan, 'I wish to God, in the interests of the whole
human race, that the War were ended'.35 By 1865, however, his concern with
American politics seems to have fizzled out; his letters showed no interest in
reconstruction and All the Year Round was concerned primarily with the war's
impact on Britain's economy.36 Dickens's reaction to the Civil War was, though,
markedly different to that of his friend and mentor, Thomas Carlyle, who insisted
in his customary high-flown rhetoric:
To me individually the Nigger's case was not the most pressing in the world,
but among the least so! America, however...felt that in the Heavens or the
Earth there was nothing so godlike, or incomparably pressing to be done...A
continent of the earth has been submerged, for certain years by deluges as
from the Pit of Hell; half a million (some say a whole million, but surely they
exaggerate) of excellent White Men, full of gifts and faculty, have torn and
slashed one another into horrid death, in a temporary humour, which will leave
centuries of remembrance fierce enough: and three million absurd Blacks, men
and brothers (of a sort), are completely 'emancipated'; launched into the
career of improvement,—likely to be 'improved off the face of the earth' in a
generation or two.37
While Dickens is saddened by the war, Carlyle clearly regards it as a type of
apocalypse—the chaos that will ensue when attempts are made to tamper with a
pre-determined world order. His reference to improvement 'off the face of the
earth' certainly echoes Dickens's observations at the end of his 'Noble Savage'
essay, yet this is where the parallels between the two writers end. Dickens
adamantly refused to reduce the conflict to the type of racialized binary that it had
become for Carlyle and would not accept the slaves as scapegoats for the massive
destruction and loss of life, which evidently posed a challenge to his friend's
notion of what constituted a civilized race.
Despite Dickens's negation of the race element involved in the American
conflict, All the Year Round did allow the debate's rhetoric to permeate its articles,
particularly once the war had ended. One of the most noteworthy articles 'Slavery
in England', attributed to Joseph Charles Parkinson, appeared in June 1867 and

harked back to some of the harrowing accounts of cruelty against slaves appended
to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The piece observed that
while measures have been taken—albeit devastating ones—to redress the social
inequalities in the United States, the conditions endured by many a British worker
remained remarkably similar to those of the slave:
High-born English ladies, it will be remembered, formally remonstrated with
their American sisters on the horrors perpetrated with the sanction or through
the indifference of the gentlemen slaveholders, and received a tart retort,
telling them to look at home, and to give up girding at their neighbours until
their own social anomalies were redressed. The sufferings of milliners and
work-girls, the extremes of poverty and wealth to be witnessed in our cities,
and the selfish indifference of fashionable life, were all aimed at in the reply;
and disinterested readers of the correspondence probably thought, with Sancho
Panza, that 'a good deal might be said on both sides9. Were any similar
controversy to arise now, the American ladies could quote facts from a
recently published blue book, which go far to show that some of the worst
evils of the slavery they have abolished flourish among us, and that in many of
our English counties bands of children of tender years are handed over bodily
to brutal and irresponsible tyrants, who corrupt and maltreat with as much
efficiency as any Southern overseer.38
This invective against poor working conditions and exploitation was prompted by
the sixth report of the Children's Employment Commission, which made a number
of shocking revelations on child labour to undermine British feelings of
superiority. With its analogies between the state of the child labourer and that of
the Southern slave, the piece aims to manipulate the righteous indignation the
reader would have expressed on reading Uncle Tom's Cabin by presenting the
children's condition so as to make it more interesting and appealing. The everyday
nature of this form of exploitation has rendered the underclass invisible, in the
geographical sense that isolated the upper and middle classes from the living areas
of the proletariat and which later in the century, was to spawn works like Booth's
In Darkest England, and the Way Out (1890). The public had also become so
habituated to the idea of child labour that it had not occurred to them to question its
morality. 'Slavery in England' therefore seeks to raise the visibility of child labour
by defamiliarizing it and couching the issue in the discourse of a popular—and
more exotic—cause like Abolition. The article takes no account of the reader's
sensibilities and deliberately aims to shock, as is exemplified in this account of the
degradation that the system has bred:
Of the ways in which our white slaves are housed, we read: They live like
pigs; great boys and girls, mother and fathers, all sleeping in one room in
many instances; and a policeman, writing of the gross immorality of the young
girls, says: "Their boldness and shamelessness I never saw equalled during
some years of police life and detective duty in the worst parts of London".
Nor is this wonderful when the character of their masters and mistresses is
considered. One old gang-master of seventy-two is convicted of an indecent
assault upon a girl of thirteen, who worked under him; and the member of
parliament who forwards the particulars, adds: "I am afraid such cases would
come oftener before the magistrates if the children dared to speak99.39
Accounts like this one would undoubtedly have alarmed the comfortable middle-
class readers, and perhaps even prompted them to action, just as novels like Oliver
Twist had done in the 1830s. Yet the interplay between the discourses of race and
class was by no means a one-way process. Since the issue of slavery was now
entangled with the devastation wreaked by the Civil War, the transposition of
British class tensions into North American terms would also have planted
misgivings in many minds. Thus an analogy that was intended to incite sympathy,
empathy and action resulted also in fears of revolution, class conflict and the
construction of the disenfranchised working classes as barbarous, volatile and
irrational.
Working-class leaders were quick to recognize the similarities between their
state and that of the black slaves overseas, and registered their support for the
North (and its economic policies) in the Civil War. At home Trade Union activity
had been stepped up after 1859 and widespread support for campaigns like the
Builders9 Union's strikes led to fears of working-class insurrection. Such anxieties
were further aroused by calls for universal male suffrage, which led the likes of
Carlyle to speak of those demanding it as 'delerious9 and to declare that the
measure was too much too soon. Carlyle believed that a working-class electorate
with the ability to vote would be uncontrollable. Dickens, on the other hand,
responded in a much more moderate manner:
As to the Reform question, it should have been, and could have been, perfectly
known to any honest man in England that the more intelligent part of the great
masses were deeply dissatisfied with the state of the representation, but were
in a very moderate and patient condition, awaiting the better intellectual
cultivation of numbers of their fellows. The old insolent resource of assailing
them and making the most audaciously hardy statements that they were
politically indifferent, has borne the inevitable fruit. The perpetual taunt
"Where are they?99 has called them out with the answer, "Well then; if you
must know, here we are99.40
Dickens sees 'the masses9, as he refers to them, as a reasoning and reasonable body
who have waited patiently for electoral reform. Later in the letter he continues, 'I
have a very small opinion of what the great-genteel have done for us, that I am
very philosophical indeed concerning what the great vulgar may do: having a
decided opinion that they can't do worse9.41 This comment illustrates how
Dickens—who had throughout his career drawn comparisons between the working
classes at home and the colonized abroad—managed to disentangle the knotted
concerns of race and class, at a time when for most, the issues were becoming
completely inseparable. Indeed, with its simple faith in the innate good nature of
the workingman, Dickens's observation reveals his fundamental belief in the
nobility of the proletariat even when misgoverned. There was no scope in his
vision of the loyal but thwarted workforce for the allegations of savagery that were
becoming a feature of class discussions, with the proletariat being reconfigured as
a separate and inferior race, incapable of improvement. This is not to suggest that
he abandoned his discourse of colonialism altogether, but that it remained static,
disregarding the racialization of class, and continuing as a useful tool for drawing
attention to the neglect of domestic issues and the less exotic others. As his
interest in political events beyond the British Isles waned, Dickens appears to have
become more tolerant of demands for reform at home, and even of the at times
menacing manner of calling for them.
Once Dickens's growing insularity in the years following the sepoy rebellion
has been registered, his lack of involvement in the Eyre case comes as less of a
surprise. It is rather astonishing, though, that in the light of the numerous parallels
made by the likes of Bright and Mill between responses to the insurrection in the
West Indies and those to the increasing political agitation in Ireland, that Dickens
had so little to say about Britain's nearest colony. Semmel has stressed the links
between the two holdings in the public mind with his observation that:
The Eyre case...posed an important imperial question, and opinions on the
matter were closely related to what was happening in the most troublesome
part of the Empire—Ireland... In 1867 and 1868, the British newspapers were
filled with stories of Fenian disturbances. After the parliamentary extension of
the suffrage, Fenian raids replaced Reform riots as a chief source of worry.
The possibility of insurrection in Ireland was real—and frightening. Governor
Eyre had crushed a Jamaica insurrection and had kept that island within the
Empire. If Eyre were convicted, would that not place an obstacle in the path
of those entrusted with the task of keeping the peace in Ireland—and keeping
an Ireland, more and more bent on Home Rule, within the United Kingdom?42
Whilst it can be argued that events in the Caribbean had no impact whatever on
him, the same may not be said of the Fenian agitation, which increased throughout
the 1860s. The unrest was no longer a distant concern and spread to the mainland
with the unsuccessful raid on Chester arsenal by over a thousand London Fenians
on 11 February. One would therefore imagine that Dickens would have responded
to the activities of the Fenian movement in a style akin to the outbursts of the late
1850s. Certainly, with an increasingly hostile portrayal of the Irish in the media
such a reaction would hardly have been unexpected, nor would it have appeared to
be extreme. The precedents for denigrating the people of Ireland were already in
place, and just as the English working classes were being compared to primitive
peoples and even gorillas, so the Irish were subject to the same comparisons on an
even greater scale. Punch was one of the forerunners in the depiction of the
Irishman—or more accurately the Fenian—as an ape [See Figure 8.1], particularly
after a failed campaign to invade Canada (November 1865) and the heightened
violence of the republicans. Indeed, as Curtis has commented:
The student of Anglo-Irish relations in the nineteenth century is bound to
encounter sooner or later enough evidence to establish that the fall of the
stereotypical Irishman from a state of disgrace in Anglo-Saxon eyes took him
further down the scale of mankind or, rather, the Hominoidea so that by the
1860s the "representative Irishman" was to all appearances an anthropoid ape.
Among the forces that accelerated Paddy's degeneration was the assumption
that there were qualities in Irish Celts which marked them off as a race or
breed quite distinct in looks or behaviour from those who claimed Anglo-
Saxon, Danish, or Norman ancestry in the British Isles.43
While Curtis correctly charts the rise of the belief that the Irish were a lower race,
his assertion that they were regarded as a race apart fails to take account of the
growing fears of atavism and the anxiety that the English working classes were
capable of sliding backwards. The Irish were constantly aligned with other
colonial groups, like the rebellious Jamaicans and Indians. Imagined resemblances
between the Irish and other non-white races, or even gorillas, could serve both
those who wished to point to Irish inferiority and those who were more
sympathetic to the rule of subject races. Moderates like the Irish war
correspondent William Howard Russell had seen similarities between the Irish
peasants and the Indian ryots during the Indian Mutiny. Even John Stuart Mill
remarked on the "many points of resemblance between the Irish and the Hindoo
character' in a curious call for Ireland to be governed in the same way as India.44
As a result of Fenian calls for the workforce on the mainland to join with
them, coupled with memories of alliances between the Chartists and the Irish
Nationalists in the 1840s, it became difficult for many people to avoid considering
the two groups in combination. Dickens, however, resisted these comparisons, just
as he rejected the view of the Irishman as belonging to a lower race.45 Although he
considered the Irish Question as one of the catalogue of domestic and imperial
disasters he listed in the letter to de Cerjat cited above, he seems to have
successfully avoided falling into the trap of pigeon-holing the Irish as troublesome
colonials who could be dealt with according to a set of generic rules for governing
others. Again, just as with Jamaica, he seems to have had remarkably little to say
on the subject of Ireland, which is particularly surprising when one considers that
he undertook two reading tours there during the politically turbulent years of 1867
and 1869. As Leon Litvack points out, his first visit of 1858 served to dispel a
number of preconceptions about stereotypical Irish behaviour, and the sensitivity
of reactions to his readings enabled him to view the Irish objectively.46 Thus,
unlike many of his contemporaries, he is able to separate the ordinary Irish people
from the Fenians. He went so far as to remark in January 1869, 'these are not
times in which other powers would back our holding Ireland by force, unless we
could make our claim good in proving fair and equal government'.47 Such a
statement, referring to American support for the Irish, is particularly noteworthy
when we consider that Dickens had direct experience of the growing troubles. His
reading tour of 1867 was very nearly cancelled in response to political events in
Ireland, and the tone of his correspondence of the time is rather dismissive, treating
the unrest as an inconvenience that will disrupt his plans. Moreover, the fact that
he was writing to reassure those at home who were concerned for his well being
must be considered when assessing the tone of his letters. Dickens was
undoubtedly less politically engaged by this time of his life and most of the letters
from the 1867 tour merely describe events without endeavouring to analyze or
judge them. Writing to Mrs Bernal Osborne in March 1867 he reveals that the
situation has an almost unreal feeling for him:
HOW NOT TO 1)0 IT.

Su. « ARKAH, THIN, IB UUBTHBBIN' HARRIDAN I HEVA8B TU1U KOBLE PATHRIOT8, OB, UK
JABBEfl, I 'LL—"
8.1 'How Not To Do It'. Punch. 12 October 1867.

When, when, when, will you be at peace in Ireland and sit under your vines
and fig-trees without hanging revolvers and Enfield rifles on the branches? I
feel as if I were in a more than usually incomprehensible dream when I am
shown a hosiery establishment in Sackville Street here, from which some
scores of young men decamped in the last wretched "risings" to starve in
wildernesses or pine in jails. So the notion of your being guarded in your
house, and of our getting involved with America (as we shall at last) on this
mad head, has a grim absurdity in it of such nightmare breed that I half believe
I shall wake presently and wonder how I ever came to invent in my sleep the
word "Fenian".48
Dickens might protest the absurdity of the situation, but it certainly did possess a
nightmarish quality that increased throughout the 1860s. Following the
catastrophe in the Crimea and the devastation that had swept across America, the
prospect of a civil war could not be ruled out, nor could American intervention.
Dickens was, then, evidently more bewildered than angered by the state of affairs
in Ireland, and his belief that England should deal with her own problems before
interfering overseas unquestionably served to increase his understanding for
demands for Home Rule.
All the Year Round's strategy for dealing with the Fenians was far more
straightforward, although it underwent an alteration in 1867. In the early 1860s the
journal simply did not take the movement seriously. As in the case of India during
the Mutiny, several historical articles appeared, depicting the long-term animosity
between landlords and tenants and dealing with the history of Fenianism. This
process is neatly demonstrated by the article, Thugee in Ireland9, the very title of
which is something of a misnomer as there is nothing remotely ritualistic about the
murder it discusses.49 Yet the word 'thugee' is immediately evocative of India and
all the connotations of insurrection that now attached themselves to the
subcontinent. The piece narrates the history of the murder of a clergyman, the
reverend Mr Knipe some sixty-five years before by a band of misguided men. In
the years before 1867 the potential threat posed by the movement was frequently
defused by resorting to humour, and this article attempts to undermine the
dangerous leader of the gang by rendering him absurd. We are informed that,
In a retired place...a force of no less than three hundred men had been silently
collecting, all well armed with swords, blunderbusses, and pistols. They were
all under the command of a person who enjoyed some lawless reputation,
under the denomination of Captain Fearnought, but whose real name was
Taite.50
Having deflated the heroic qualities of the captain by exposing his true (and rather
mundane) identity, the author continues to suggest that the members of the band
were beguiled by hyperbole. This time it is wild exaggeration which makes the
loyalty of the followers seem ridiculous, as their initiation is juxtaposed with a
series of wild rumours:
All these men had been sworn to a very strange oath "to God and the world, to
certify the truth"; also, "to dethrone all kings, plant the tree of liberty in
Ireland, and be a republic like America". And their leader had further
inflamed their animosity with a stirring and appropriate speech, in which he

reminded them of the rumours then abroad that the Reverend Mr Knipe was
shortly to be placed at the head of one hundred thousand men, whom he would
lead in person to exterminate the innocent Irish peasantry.51
This unquestioning commitment to the death of all kings further reveals the
author's belief that the men have been seduced unthinkingly by empty rhetoric,
while the allegations about Mr Knipe point to their gullibility. The piece goes on
to recount several similar murders, presumably with the intention of showing the
reader that revenge killings had been going on for generations and that the
perpetrators have always been caught and punished for their deeds.
Another important tactic in the pre-1867 articles was to negate the actual cause
of the republicans. The 'Thugee in Ireland' piece achieves this aim with an
account of the murder of another religious figure, this time a Catholic priest noted
for his benevolence, who is killed for guessing that a gang of men he meets are
Fenians. The authorial voice intervenes after the murder has been narrated:
It will be observed how little sectarian animosity had to do with this awful
crime—how little that deep reverence for the priestly character, which signally
characterises the Irish peasantry, availed to save this unfortunate gentleman
from the consequences of his dangerous knowledge.52
Thus, the peasantry, who have already been dismissed for the "artful disguise of
their real feelings' are sweepingly categorized as bloody, warlike, vengeful and
unthinking.53 The author sets the tone for these generalizations at the beginning of
the piece by observing that, '[a] sort of wantonness gets into a nation's veins'.54
Significantly, no attempt is made to differentiate the ordinary Irish peasant from
the minority who have succumbed to the rallying-cry of the Fenian leaders.
Implicit in this move is the belief that if they had not been fighting to free
themselves from English hegemony, then the Irish would be fighting amongst
themselves for some other reason, according to what the writer refers to as the
"wild code of the place'.55 Disunity among the Irish is further emphasized in a
subsequent article ironically entitled 'The Fenian Brothers', which begins with a
discussion of opposition to the erection of a statue in memory of Prince Albert on
the college green in Dublin. The essay continues to discuss the Irish National Fair
in Chicago and registers a sympathy akin to that of Dickens for the Irish Catholics
when it asserts of the Catholic Church:
Oppressed as their Church truly is by a dominant Protestant establishment,
which is the genuine cause of more than half the bad blood of the country, its
honest efforts to check the "Young Irish" party in its wild course of sedition
have been unintermitting, and made at some sacrifice of popular influence.56
Unlike its predecessor, this piece manages to separate the ordinary Irish from the
Fenians, but nevertheless it resorts to the same ridiculing tactics by taking swipes
at 'Fenian spelling' and 'Irish sense'.57 In spite of the fact that this article registers
the oppression that Catholics have had to contend against, its author goes on to
attempt to vindicate Britain's conduct during the potato famine and suggests that
the peasantry has been wilfully misled through a 'love of fighting somebody or
anybody':
[Tjhere is a tragic side of it, not, indeed, for England, but for the warm-hearted
people among the untaught masses of Ireland, who are thus misled. The
Fenian chiefs are themselves no better taught than the majority of sharpers.
They write about "blessings and boquets" [sic] and "auxilliary entertainments"
[sic] and everywhere, in distorted ill-spelt language, scatter their wicked
perversions of the truth. What Irishman of moderate intelligence does not
know how heartily England strove to allay the distress of the Irish famine of
1847-8, yet thus a "smart" Fenian ventures to play on the credulity of his
victims.5*
The piece then continues to recount the speech of a Fenian who had adopted the
Swiftian view that the English hoped to eradicate the Irish by allowing them to
starve to death. However, once again, rather than endeavouring to empathize with
the Irish or to discover why they felt this way, the article merely seeks to discredit
the Fenians as under-educated and dishonest.
All the Year Round's attitude towards Ireland underwent a radical alteration in
1867. Dickens was, between January and May, involved in a particularly gruelling
schedule of public readings (including his visit to Ireland during March). Whereas
in the past American Fenians had been little more than a joke, after the attempted
rising in Dublin on 5 March, they were now regarded as dangerous conspirators.
As I have demonstrated, Dickens was unusual in his unwillingness to condemn the
Irish, but he was—as is exemplified by his 1866 letter to de Cerjat [see above]—
very much afraid of the consequences of American involvement in the Irish
Question, and feared that a war would ultimately ensue. Fenian disturbances
ceased to be matters for humorous treatment as activity on the mainland was
stepped up and they came to pose a very real threat. Pieces like "Fenian James
Fitzpatrick' and 'Curragh Camp', which sought to reassure the public by pointing
to a long history of detection of Fenian plots, began to appear with greater
frequency.59 American Fenian supporters are shown to be treacherous even to their
own comrades, as in 'Fenian James Fitzpatrick9 where an American murders the
eponymous subversive anti-hero for knowing too much. Equally, 'The Fifth of
March in Dublin9 highlights the American role in the conspiracy without any of the
humour or caricaturing displayed in pieces like 'The Fenian Brothers9.
Dickens's colonial discourse thus underwent an extraordinary revision in the
1860s, enabling him to separate class and race issues that were increasingly being
conflated by both science and the media. His thought process was completely
reconfigured in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, and thus by refusing to allow
domestic and imperial occurrences to merge he was able to respond to each
individually, rather than allowing his anger to accumulate and finally erupt. By
this time of his life Dickens had become totally disillusioned with the governing
classes, and his sympathies were with the working man, with whose frustration he
identified and whose self-restraint he admired. He was therefore able to resist the
analogies that were made by those around him and could deal with each domestic
or colonial dilemma individually, and thence more moderately.
Notes
1 Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels. Quoted in James (Jan) Morris. Heaven's Command:
An Imperial Progress. 1973. Penguin: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1979. 316.
2 Douglas A. Lorimer. Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro
in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Leicester: Leicester University Press. 1978. 121.
3 To W.H. Wills, November 25, 1862. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 10.
166.
4 Bernard Semmel. The Governor Eyre Controversy. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1962.
7.
5 Gad Heuman. Trom Slave Rebellions to Morant Bay: The Tradition of Protest in
Jamaica'. In Wolfgang Binder (ed). Slavery in the Americas. Wtirzburg: KOnighausen
and Neuman, 1993. 151. Heuman asserts that the ratio of black to white had increased
from ten to one in the eighteenth century, to thirteen to one.
6 Heuman. Trom Slave Rebellions to Morant Bay'. 153.
7 Heuman. Trom Slave Rebellions to Morant Bay'. 161.
8 See Paul Sharad 'Speaking the Unspeakable: London, Cambridge and the Caribbean'.
In Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds) De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and
Textuality. London and New York: Routledge 201-218.
9 Sharad. 208.
10 Sharad. 209.
11 Sharad. 208.
12 Thomas C. Holt. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and
Britain, 1832-1938. 264-5.
13 Holt. The Problem of Freedom. 277.
14 Throughout the disturbances, according to Heuman, Paul Bogle, one of the men
identified by Eyre as a ringleader, maintained that he was not rebelling against
Victoria. See Gad Heuman. The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica.
Warwick University Caribbean Studies. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 1994. 37-37.
15 Jamaica Papers Number One. Facts and Documents Relating to the Alleged Rebellion
in Jamaica, and the Measures of Repression, Including Notes on the Trial of Mr
Gordon. London: the Jamaica Committee. 1866. 28.
16 Jamaica Papers. 26.
18 Philip D. Curtin. Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony 1830-1865.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1955.
20 Bernard Semmel. The Governor Eyre Controversy. 22.
21 H.L. Malchow. Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press. 1996. 213.
22 To W.W.F. de Cerjat, November 30, 1865. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume
11. 114-116. The only other critic to deal with Dickens and Jamaica is K.J. Fielding.
See K.J. Fielding. 'Edwin Drood and Governor Eyre'. The Listener. Volume 48.
December 25, 1952. 1083-1084.
23 To W.W.F. de Cerjat, November 30, 1865. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume
11. 115.
24 George H. Ford. 'The Governor Eyre Case in England'. University of Toronto
Quarterly. 17. April 1948. 227.
25 Ford. 'The Governor Eyre Case in England'. 227-228.
26 See Ford 'The Governor Eyre Case in England' 220 and 227-228.
27 Carlyle. Shooting Niagara. 5.

28 'Under Fire'. All the Year Round. February 17, 1866. 125-127. Given the marked
change in attitudes toward India and the Indians which had been a part of the journal's
campaign for investment in the Indian cotton industry, the presence of this article is
somewhat incongruous. It is clearly a result of Edward Eyre's parallels between events
in India and those in Jamaica, although the piece itself is a rather unremarkable account
of a soldier's experiences whilst serving under Sir Colin Campbell.
29 'Black is not Quite White'. All the Year Round. March 3,1866. 173.
30 Oppenlander does not identify the author of this article.
31 'Black is not Quite White'. 174.
34 To W.W.F. de Cerjat, March 16, 1862. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 10.
53-54.
35 To Captain E. E. Morgan, 6 January 1863. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume
10. 190.
36 The only two references to the American Civil War in Dickens's correspondence of
1865-1867 are 'To Mrs Kemble, March 1,1865' and 'To W.W.F. de Cerjat, November
30, 1865', both of which are cited here. See The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume
11. 21 & 114-116.
37 Carlyle. Shooting Niagara: And After? Reprinted from Macmillan 's Magazine for
August 1867 With Some Additions and Corrections. London: Chapman & Hall, 1867.
7.
38 'Slavery in England'. All the Year Round. June 15, 1867. 585.
39 'Slavery in England'. 588.
40 To W.W.F. de Cerjat, January 1, 1867. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 11.
292. As the editors of the Pilgrim edition point out in a footnote, Dickens is here
responding to a mass meeting of between 22,000 and 25,000 people held by the
Trades' Societies in the grounds of Beaufort House, where it was declared that the only
Reform Bill that would satisfy would be one that would enfranchise all men.
41 To W.W.F. de Cerjat, January 1, 1867. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 11.
293.
42 Bernard Semmel. The Governor Eyre Controversy. 133.
43 L. Perry Curtis. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Newton
Abbot: David & Charles. 1971. 1-2.
44 John Stuart Mill. England and Ireland. London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer.
1868. 22.
45 Dickens was certainly still au fait with the evolutionary debate in the 1860s, as is
demonstrated by his letter to the naturalist Professor Richard Owen thanking him for a
copy of his Memoir of the Gorilla—which he claimed to have read for 'the twentieth
time'. See To Professor Richard Owen, July 12,1865. The Letters of Charles Dickens.
Volume 11. 69-70. It is likely that this awareness was the very factor which made
such parallels so unappealing to him. Indeed, Semmel has pointed out the paradoxical
behaviour of the evolutionists with reference to the Eyre controversy with his
observation that, '[I]t was the evolutionists, the theorists of the struggle for existence
and survival of the fittest, who protested against the operation of just these principles in
Jamaica, while the opponents of evolutionary doctrine turned out to be advocates of a
primitive 'social-Darwinism". [Bernard Semmel. The Governor Eyre Controversy.
120.]
46 Leon Litvack. 'Ireland and the Irish'. In Paul Schlicke (ed). The Oxford Reader's
Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 297-8.
47 To W.W.F. de Cerjat, January 4, 1869. Mary Dickens and Georgina Hogarth (ed.).
The Letters of Charles Dickens 1833-1870. London: Macmillan & Co, 1893.
48 To Mrs Bernal Osborne, 16 March, 1867. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Volume 11.
336.
49 See also The Fenians'. All the Year Round. October 21, 1865. 300-304. This article
undertakes an historical quest for the real Ossianic Fenians of fourteen hundred years
before, and demonstrates how they differed from the movement of the 1860s. The
piece undermines the latter-day Fenians by demonstrating how their plots are always
uncovered before they may be carried out and generally implying that recruits are
misguided in their allegiances.
50 'Thugee in Ireland'. All the Year Round. June 28,1862. 374.
51 'Thugee in Ireland'. 375.
54 'Thugee in Ireland'. 374. My italics.
56 'The Fenian Brothers'. All the Year Round. June 4,1864. 392.
57 'The Fenian Brothers'. 392.
58 'The Fenian Brothers'. 392.
59 See All the Year Round, May 18,1867 488-492 and May 25,1867 520-524. Also 'The
Fifth of March in Dublin' All the Year Round, April 6,1867 342-345.
Afterword
Having successfully separated out the issues of race and class, Dickens went on to
write what might have become his first novel dealing overtly with the Empire, The
Mystery of Edwin Drood. His vision of the East had already been problematized in
the two works preceding Drood: Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend.
Indeed, Lyn Pykett reminds us (following Edward Said) that in Great
Expectations, 'the penal colony of Australia, the space of Britain's social residue,
is opposed to the Orient, in this case Egypt, where Pip forges his new life, the
space of "normality" and enterprise'.1 Although the East is certainly a place of
enterprise, Pip's treatment of Egypt is perfunctory, to say the least. Given his
endless nostalgia for the Kent marshes, his time in Egypt is almost akin to
Magwitch's banishment to the Antipodes; he does not engage with his
surroundings and yearns only for the home he cannot regain and Estella, the
woman he cannot have. The East is, for Pip, a place of employment, where he can
live frugally and accumulate enough capital to pay his debts. He has no
imaginative relationship with the location, and we learn almost nothing of his life
there, beyond his visions of the forge.
This flagrant exploitation of the Orient is developed in Our Mutual Friend,
where the narrator aligns the duplicitous moneylender Fascination Fledgeby with
an Eastern decadence and exoticism at odds with his less-than-scintillating
reputation, but feeding off the accumulation of Jewish stereotypes that Fledgeby
himself has piled upon the decent, upstanding Mr Riah. Fledgeby is attired in
'Turkish slippers, rose-coloured Turkish trousers (got cheap from somebody who
had cheated some other somebody out of them), and a gown and cap to
correspond' [OMF 422], and as Daniel Christiansen has noted, the narrator
reiterates his 'Turkishness' no fewer than thirteen times.2 Fledgeby's Turkish garb
is restricted to premises of his firm, Pubsey & Co. and a scene in which he
mobilizes anti-Semitic stereotypes to terrify the debtor Mr. Lammle into believing
that he is Riah's grip. When Fledgeby dons the ironic 'Christian attire' [OMF 432]
on leaving the building, he signals an association between the East and duplicity,
as well as a connection between the Orient and the accumulation of wealth. Our
Mutual Friend is packed with both oriental and imperial images, like the 'hindoo
baby in the bottle' belonging to Mr Venus, or the comparison of Mrs Wilfer to a
'Savage Chief [OMF 807]. Likewise, while he is disguised as John Rokesmith,
John Harmon is employed by a 'China House'; itself offering a tempting and ironic
metaphor for the fragility of Eastern capital in a novel caught up with the artifice of
paper money. Harmon's wife, Bella encapsulates the commodified place of this
over-determined Orient with her lack of interest in her husband's employment:
[W]hich she found quite satisfactory, without pursuing the China house into
minuter details than a wholesale vision of tea, rice, odd-smelling silks, carved
boxes, and tight-eyed people in more than double-soled shoes, with their
pigtails pulling their heads of hair off, painted on transparent porcelain.
For Bella, the East is nothing more than a set of images and a source of revenue,
just as it was, on a basic realist level, for a large number of consumers in
nineteenth-century Britain. Dickens here registers both the growing presence of
the Empire in everyday British life, but he also moves towards a critique of the
fantasies woven around distant countries, which he seems to have developed still
further in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Dickens's untimely death in 1870, at the age of fifty-eight prevented him from
witnessing Britain's increasingly aggressive imperial policy in the final third of the
nineteenth century. One can only speculate on how the creator of Mrs Jellyby
would have responded to the massive accumulation of African territory by
maverick entrepreneurs like Cecil Rhodes, and the ensuing defence of those areas
at the British tax-payer's expense. However, it is safe to say that any novel he
might have written would have been satirical in the extreme.
Once he had finally managed to contain the Empire on an imaginative level,
and to prevent it from merging with his discussions of the Condition of England,
Britain's overseas holdings seem to have opened up new creative possibilities for
Dickens. Having at last disentangled himself from the colonialist discourse that
had resulted in the massive crisis he experienced during the Indian Mutiny, the
most important character Dickens creates in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is not the
eponymous (and remarkably flat) hero, but rather John Jasper. Both Howard
Duffleld and Edmund Wilson, following Forster, have convincingly argued that
Jasper is a Thug—a worshipper of Kali, the goddess of destruction—who has at
least attempted to murder his nephew in a ritualistic garrotting.3 Although there is
no way to confirm these speculations, circumstantial evidence such as Dickens's
renewed interest in Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839)
supports this reading. Nevertheless, I shall assume here that the sinister and
opium-addicted Jasper would ultimately have been exposed as guilty of the
attempted murder, if not the outright killing of Drood.
One of Jasper's roles in this heavily orientalized novel is to point to the
dangers of cross-cultural contamination. We first see Jasper through the medium
of his wildly exotic opium dream, which takes place, not in the Far East, but in the
equally foreign East End of London. The commencement of a narrative in this
unconventional and surreal mode is threatening in the extreme, particularly as it
marks such a stylistic rupture from Dickens's previous work:
What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by
the Sultan's orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one.
It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long
procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten
thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants
caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and
attendants. [ED 1]
There is a suffocating quality to this sumptuous and overwhelming imagery, which
has almost completely subsumed Jasper's sense of self, so that only the
Cloisterham Cathedral tower remains as a marker of his day-to-day existence.4
These images, though, draw upon a pre-existing discourse of the Orient. There is
Afterword 183
nothing new or original about Jasper's visions, which could almost have been
culled directly from the pages of Thomas De Quincey and are—like the
engagement between Rosa and Edwin, already determined—by received ideas
about the East. In a petulant fit Rosa dismisses Egypt as 'tiresome'—her only
experience being the devouring of Eastern sweetmeats. However, Rosa could
almost be referring to the endlessly repeated exotic discourses surrounding the
Orient, giving it a peculiarly unreal quality and, through its self-referential nature,
shaping Western reactions to the East. As Miriam O'Kane Mara points out, the
Orient in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is represented almost solely through
commodities, and while characters like Rosa and Jasper consume its products,
Eastern merchandize and decadence in turn consumes them.5 The small town of
Cloisterham is awash with delicacies from the East, and Dickens seems to be
deliberately and parodically overwhelming his characters in Eastern goods and
imagery. The sheer accumulation of imperial imports is almost like one of Flora
Finching's breathless, exotic Eastern imaginings made real, and by piling image
upon image, Dickens seems to be deliberately exposing the inadequacy and
dangers of existing imperial narratives by emphasizing both how they are
preconceived and taken for granted as truths.
That other East, the East End is indubitably a foreign world for Jasper, but it does
not pose a threat to him in the same way as the Orient. According to Tim Dolin:
[When Jasper is] confronted with his own reflection in the haggard old English
face of a woman "who has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the
Chinaman" [ED 38], he recognises too the full horror of his social descent.
His essential Englishness, his power to remake himself, is threatened by the
affinity he has with the East End.6
However, it is not so much social descent into the slums of East London that Jasper
has to fear, but rather ethnic descent or the effacement of his own English identity
by the Orient. When the East merges with the East End the results for the
individual are catastrophic; by imbibing Eastern substances, old women like the
Princess Puffer may lose their English features and come to appear Chinese, while
cathedral choirmasters are driven to desperate and uncharacteristic acts that
threaten their domestic worlds. As Mara has suggested, "colonial infection begins,
not in the colonies, but with the British themselves and their attempts to ingest
other cultures'.7 The dangers of this fusion of East and West would have been
particularly pertinent to Dickens, having induced a crisis of his own through
allowing the imperial and domestic to merge.
If John Jasper's behaviour does not offer sufficient warning of the dangers of
losing one's English identity and domestic perspective, then Neville Landless
explicitly points to the perils of "going native' when he declares to Mr Crisparkle:
I have been brought up among abject and servile dependents, of an inferior
race, and I may easily have contracted some affinity with them. Sometimes, I
don't know but that it may be a drop of what is tigerish in their blood. [ED
63]
Dickens's working notes reveal an ambiguity surrounding the ethnic background
of the Landlesses, and in one note to himself he pondered, 'Mixture of Oriental
blood—or imperceptibly acquired mixture in them'.8 However, Neville's

comments here clearly identify him as of British stock, even if he does not espouse
the set of moral and behavioural values associated with Britishness. The people of
Cloisterham are obviously parodied for their willingness to cast Neville in the role
of the violent colonial who has whipped to death natives in their droves, again
drawing upon pre-existing narratives of 'native' treachery [ED 184-5]. Implicit in
Neville's association of his more brutal traits with his upbringing in Ceylon there
is also a belief in the fragility of a national identity that can be eroded through
contact with other, lesser, races.
Dickens's concerns with the loss of identity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood
clearly anticipate the fears of atavistic backsliding that became increasingly
prominent with the heightened imperial expansion at the end of the nineteenth
century and which came to preoccupy writers like Joseph Conrad. Conrad focused
upon how the European, as exemplified by the enigmatic Mr Kurtz in Heart of
Darkness, could reel back to a primitive, dictatorial and often murderous state
through being placed in a position of unregulated authority, thus stripping away the
veneer of English civilization. However, on the eve of the so-called 'Scramble for
Africa' Dickens, although attracted by the sheer otherness of the Empire, was
arguably more anxious that the English character and narrative strategies for
approaching the East could not stand up against the overwhelming nature of other,
more exotic cultures. Once he had unravelled his discussions of class and race, he
evidently wished to make clear the dangers inherent in the process of
subconsciously conflating the two. The Mystery of Edwin Drood marks the true
closure of Dickens's discourse through its attempts to pinpoint that which is
English, and that which is not.
Notes
1 LynPykett. Critical Issues: Charles Dickens. Basingstoke: Pal grave, 2002. 169
2 I am grateful to Daniel Martin Christiansen for a number of interesting discussions on
Our Mutual Friend.
3 See Howard Duffield. 'John Jasper—Strangled. American Bookman. Volume 70,
1930. Edmund Wilson. The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. 1952.
London: Methuen, 1961.
4 For an in-depth discussion of orientalism and the-effects of hallucinogens in The
Mystery of Edwin Drood see Joachim D. Stanley. Opium as Indiscipline: A
Foucaldian Study in Narcotics and Literature. Unpublished M.A. dissertation:
University of Exeter, 1999. 27-43.
5 Miriam O'Kane Mara. 'Sucking the Empire Dry: Colonial Critique in The Mystery of
Edwin Drood9. Dickens Studies Annual. Volume 32,2002. 240-41.
6 Tim Dolin. 'Race and the Social Plot in The Mystery of Edwin Drood9. The Victorians
and Race. Ed. Shearer West. Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1997. 98.
7 Miriam O'Kane Mara. 'Sucking the Empire Dry: Colonial Critique. 234.
8 Quoted in Dolin. 'Race and the Social Plot in The Afystery of Edwin Drood9. 85.
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Index
Aberdeen, George Gordon, 4th Earl of, 'The Administration of India', 142
76, 84, 90n27 'The Pursuit of Tantia Tope', 142
Abolition, 43-71, 105, 157, 159, 160, 'Our Only Danger in India', 142
169, 170 Blake, William, 16, 23
Abolition of Sati Act, see India Blanchard, Sidney Laman, 119, 133nl9
Adams, John Quincy, 47 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 44, 70n6
Administrative Reform Association, 3, Bogle, Paul, 178nl4
84 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 25
Africa, 36, 44, 57, 58, 60, 63, 93, 95, 98, Bongie, Chris, 105, 111n49
105, 123, 157, 167, 182, 184 Booth, General William, 31, 170
Albert Memorial, 97 In Darkest England, 170
Albert, Prince Consort, 4, 26, 32, 76, 97, Bowen, John, 53, 58, 61, 72n31, 73n50
176 Bradbury and Evans (publishers), 87
Allen, William, 68 Brantlinger, Patrick, 7, 15, 19n3, 20n27
Alma, Battle of the, 82 20n28, 24, 40n1, 40n9, 41n38, 64,
America, 2, 7, 9, 142, 149, 166 72n44, 73n60, 94-95, 109nlO,
Boycott of American cotton, 157 109nl4, 123, 129, 134n38, 164
Civil War, 55, 149, 157, 158, 160, Briggs, Asa, 7, 19n4, 19n11, 41n24
168, 169, 171, 175, 179n36 Bright, John, 158, 163, 172
Declaration of Independence, 47,151 British Museum, 38
Native Americans, 51, 54 Broderip, W.J., 7-8, 19n5
Ojibbeway Indians, 67 Brontë, Charlotte, 11, 19n15
Anderson, Benedict, 22 Jane Eyre, 11, 19nl5
Andrews, Malcolm, 24, 40n10 Brooke, Sir James, 121, 133n23
Anthropological Society, 32 Brooks, Chris, 40n8, 40n11, 41n39, 88
Arabian Nights, 76, 106 90n23, 90n33, 109nl9
Asiatik Society of Bengal, see India Brougham, Lord, 55
Australia, 1, 7-20, 159, 181 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 111n46
Emigration, 7-14, 18 Brunei, Isambard Kingdom, 89nl9
First Fleet, 14 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, 44
Transportation, 14-18 Natural History 44
Buie, Theodore, 159
Babbage, Charles, 89nl9 Builders' Union Strikes, 171
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15-16, 20n29, 20n30 Burke, Edmund, 94, 110n32
Ball, Charles, 153 Buxton, William, 55, 68
Bayley, John, 37, 38 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 82
Begum, see Khanum, Hussani
Bentham, Jeremy, 14, 20n27, 23, 49, 106 Caldecott, A.T., 65
Bentley's Miscellany, 22 Campbell, Sir Colin, 179n28
Bhaba, Homi K., 59, 60, 73n52, 73n53, Campbell, Thomas, 14, 20n26, 20n33
115, 132n6, 146, 147, 155n24, 155n26 Canada, 1, 11, 164, 172
Bibighar, see India Canning, Charles John, Governor-
Birmingham Post, 162, 163 General of India, 139, 140, 155n9
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 142 Canning, George, 127
144 Capper, John, 14, 20n25, 52, 72n26,
105, 106, 108,111n48,111n50,149 Collins, Philip, 16, 20n31

Carey, Peter, 20n33 Collins, Wilkie, 45, 95, 102, 122, 123,
Jack Maggs, 20n33 124, 133n25
Carlyle, Thomas, 27, 45, 46, 55, 64, 65, The Moonstone, 45, 102, 123
68, 71n8, 73n62, 73n64, 73n65, 76, Concert of Europe, 76
89n6, 129, 163-69, 171, 179n27, Condition of England Question, 3, 11,
179n47 50, 83, 86, 182
Chartism, 64 Conrad, Joseph, 184
Latter-Day Pamphlets, 64, 73n64 Coutts, Angela Burdett, 7, 8, 29, 51, 81,
Occasional Discourse on the 82, 89n18, 104, 109nl6, 110n44, 116,
Nigger Question, 45, 64, 68, 71n8, 121, 131, 133n24, 133n33, 133n34
73n61, 73n62, 73n65, 165, Cowan, James, 89nl9
167 Crimean War, 3, 4, 29, 52, 75-88, 106,
Past and Present, 41n20, 64 124, 128, 144, 146, 175
Shooting Niagara, 165, 179n27, Crimean War Songbook, 88, 90n35
179n37 Cropper, The Hon. Mrs Edward, 73n63,
Catlin, George, 67, 68 74n71
Central Committee of the Working Crump, Lieutenant Charles, 120
Classes for the Great Exhibition, 27 Crystal Palace, 4, 5, 26-30, 67, 78, 80,
Cerjat, W.W.F. de, 164, 168,173,177, 96, 97, 102
178n22, 178n23, 179n34,179n36, Curtis, L. Perry, 172, 173, 179n43
179n40, 179n41, 180n47 Curtin, Philip D., 178nl8
Ceylon Examiner, 105 Curzon, Lord, Viceroy of India, 135
Chadwick, Edwin, 34, 71n8, 80 Cuvier, Georges, 148
Chambers, Robert, 44
Vestiges of the Natural History of Darwin, Charles, 34, 44, 118, 147, 148,
Creation, 44 149, 163
Change for American Notes, 51, 55, Darwinism, 40
71n24, 72n37 The Origin of Species, 44
Chartism, 27, 30, 31, 34, 80, 131 Dascent, George, 83, 84
Chaudhuri, S.B., 140 David, Deirdre, 10, 19n13
Chenery, Thomas, 83 Davis, Lance E., 3, 6n8, 110n42
Chennells, Anthony, 13, 19n21 Day, William, 57, 72n45, 72n46
Chester Arsenal, 172 Debord, Guy, 41nl8, 103, 110n38,
Children of the Mist, 66 110n39
Children's Employment Commission, Defoe, Daniel, 14
170 Moll Flanders, 14
China, 16, 23, 116, 181, 183 Delane, John, 83, 84
Chisholm, Caroline, 8, 9, 19n7, Denman, Lord Thomas, 56, 65, 66, 67,
Cholera, 16, 80, 81, 92, 114, 125, 160 71nll, 72n36, 73n67, 74n76, 74n79
Christianson, Daniel Martin, 181, 184n2 Devonshire, Duke of, 26, 74n75
Clifford, Captain Henry, 75, 88nl De Quincey, Thomas, 183
Clive, Robert, Baron, 91, 118, 149 Dickens, Alfred, 1
Clyde, Lord, 144 Dickens, Charles,
Cohn, Norman, 119 Anger, 75, 83, 85, 88, 108, 121-22,
Cole, Alfred Whaley, 69, 72n40 124, 125-126, 128, 129, 164
Cole, Henry, 4, 26, 27, 40nl6, 41n23, Attitude to history, 25-26
74n81 Attitude to urban poor, 2, 7, 30-38, 40
Colley, Linda, 40n2, 43, 46, 47, 70n3, 56, 68, 83
71nl2, 71nl3, 113, 132n3 Childhood, 1
Index 203
Commissions a drying machine, 82 'Slavery in England', 170,

Considers tour of Australia, 12 179n38, 179n39
Depressed, 3, 22, 85, 124, 169 'Thugee in Ireland', 175, 176,
Night wanderings, 39 180n50, 180n51, 180n52,
Opposition to slavery, 43-70, 160 180n53, 180n54, 180n55
Outbursts of prejudice, 166 'Under Fire', 166, 179n28
Problem of ending, 10-11 American Notes, 9, 47, 49, 50, 52,
Race, 43-70 53, 56, 58, 65, 67, 71n16, 105
Reading tour, 173 Barnaby Rudge, 30, 34, 41n37, 129
Urania Cottage project, 7, 12, 37 Bleak House, 2, 22, 23, 29, 31, 35,
Visits America, 10, 43-70, 72n27 36, 39, 41n30, 45, 51, 63, 65, 69,
Warren's Blacking Factory, 37-38 71nll, 73n67, 74n76, 74n79, 78,
Works 83, 124, 147-148
All the Year Round, 22, 86, 90n30, A Child's History of England, 24
135, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, A Christmas Carol, 35, 94
149, 151, 155nl6, 155nl7, 155nl8, David Copperfield, 10, 12, 13, 17,
155nl9, 156n29, 156n30, 156n31, 83, 96
156n33, 156n34, 156n35, 156n36, Dombey and Son, 2, 4, 15, 17, 51,
156n37, 157, 166, 168, 169, 175, 59, 60-63, 69, 73n57, 96, 160
177, 179n28, 179n29, 179n31, The Frozen Deep, 122, 133n26
179n32, 179n33, 180n49, 180n50, Great Expectations, 14-18, 23, 63,
180n51, 180n52, 180n53, 180n54, 181
180n55, 180n56, 180n57, 180n58, Hard Times, 2, 11, 23, 64, 75, 114
180n59 Household Words 4, 8, 10, 14, 27,
'The Adventures of Ali 28, 37, 49, 52, 55, 63, 64, 67, 68,
Mahmud', 86, 90n30 69, 71n20, 72n26, 72n40, 73n63,
'Black is not Quite White', 166, 74n80, 76, 78, 80, 84, 85, 87,
168, 179n28, 179n29, 179n31, 89n8, 89nlO, 89nl3, 89nl4,
179n32, 179n33 89nl7, 90n28, 90n29, 90n32, 95,
'Cotton Cultivation in Bengal, 104, 105, 107, 111n45, 111n48,
149, 156n35, 156n36, 156n37 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119,
'Cotton Fields', 156n34 121, 122, 128, 130, 132nl4,
'CurraghCamp', 177 132nl5, 132nl7, 132nl8,
'An Empire Saved', 141, 144, 133nl9, 135, 139, 142, 157, 160
156n31 'An Australian Ploughman's
'England Long, Long Ago', 148, Story', 19n17
156n33 'A Bundle of Emigrants'
'European Mutiny in India', Letters', 9, 19n8
155nl9 'A Cape Coast Cargo', 55,
'The Fenian Brothers', 176, 72n40
180n56, 180n57, 180n58 'Chips', 8
'The Fenians', 180n49 'The Claims of Labour', 28,
'Fenian James Fitzpatrick', 177 41n21, 41n22
'The Fifth of March in Dublin', 'The Detective Police', 38
177, 180n59 'The Family Colonisation
'How the Victoria Cross Was Loan Society', 19n6
Won', 141, 144, 155nl8 'The First Sack of Delhi', 118,
'Money or Merit', 144, 155nl6 132nl7, 132nl8
'Our Nearest Relation', 148, 'First Stage to Australia', 14
156n29, 156n30 'Freedom or Slavery?', 55, 72n40
'Good Intentions', 55, 72n40 Minsk', 89n9

'Gone to the Dogs', 85 'The Turk at Home', 76, 89n8
'A Home Question', 80, 'That Other Public', 85
89nl6 'To Working Men', 80, 81,
'At Home with the Russians', 89nl7, 125
77, 89n10 Little Dorrit, 3, 11, 16, 22, 30,
'India Pickle', 52, 72n26 70, 80, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89nl9,
'It is Not Generally Known', 90n22, 124
78, 89nl4 Martin Chuzzlewit, 9, 10, 11, 13,
'The Great Exhibition and the 58, 61
Little One', 28 Miscellaneous Papers, 68
'Last Words of the Old Year', 41 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 59,
'Letters of Introduction to 60, 178n22, 181-184
Sydney', 19n23, 20n24, 38 Nicholas Nickleby, 13, 21, 22, 23
'A Mutiny in India', 117, The Old Curiosity Shop, 13, 22, 29,
132nl4, 132nl5 30-31, 69, 131
'The Mofussil', 52, 72n26 Oliver Twist, 13, 29, 37, 51, 71n8,
'Night Walks', 39 82, 160, 171
'The Noble Savage', 4, 5, 44, 63- Our Mutual Friend, 11, 16, 23, 24,
70, 94, 95, 165, 169 26, 71n8, 181
'North American Slavery', 64, The Pickwick Papers, 2, 13, 14, 22,
65, 73n63, 74n68 35, 38, 40n5, 44, 61, 62, 82, 96,
'On Duty with Inspector Field', 116, 124, 160
38 Reprinted Pieces, 66
'Our Indian Commission', 106 'Review of the Niger Expedition',
'The Peasants of British India', 68, 69, 70
105, 111n48, 111n50 Sketches by Boz, 35, 45, 50, 160
"The Perils of Certain English A Tale of Two Cities, 30, 81, 95,
Prisoners', 95, 104, 121, 121, 122, 126, 129, 130, 132,
124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 133n26, 136, 141, 142, 145, 146,
133n25, 139, 141, 151 150, 151, 152
'Prince Bull', 85 Uncommercial Traveller, 38, 39
'The Quiet Poor', 78, 89n13 Dickens, Charles Jr. (Charley), 1
'Rent Day Round Madras', Dickens, Francis (Frank), 104
107, 111n53 Dickens, Mary, 180n47
'The Roving Englishman', 76, Dickens, Walter Savage Landor, 1,51,
89n8 110n44, 116, 126, 129
'The Santals', 133nl9 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 13, 19n1,
'Sepoy Symbols of Mutiny', 19n22, 58, 73n49
115, 132n7 Disraeli, Benjamin, 25, 28, 34, 108, 119
'Some Amenities of War', Sybil or the Two Nations, 25, 34,
89nl2 40nl2, 41n24, 41n36, 135, 136,
'Somebody, Nobody and 139, 149, 154n2, 155n4, 155n5,
Everybody', 90n32 155n6
'That Other Public', 90n28, Dolben, Sir William, 55
90n29 Dolin, Tim, 34, 41n35, 183, 184n6,
'The Thousand and One 184n8
Humbugs', 86 Dore, Gustave, 38, 41n45
'The Toady Tree', 85-86 Douglass, Frederick, 57
'The True Story of the Nuns of Duffield, Howard, 182,184n3
Index 205
Dunderdale, George, 17, 20n35 71n23, 72n28, 72n30, 72n43, 73n58,

Dyer, Richard, 147, 156n28 85
Fox, Lady Augusta, 70nl
East India Company, 2, 60, 91, 93, 94, Fox, Franklin, 72n40
95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, Fraser, George MacDonald, 141
107, 108, 110n32, 113, 114, 128, 130 Eraser's Magazine, 73n61
Edwards, Herbert, 139 French Revolution, 57, 129, 131
Edwards, P.D., 89n11 Froude, J.A., 89n6
Egypt, 95, 97, 109n24, 115, 181, 183 Fryer, Peter, 44, 70n4, 71n6
Eliot, George, 10, 75
Elliotson, John, 70n6 Gagging Act, 140
Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 101 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 1, 2, 10, 11, 19nl6,
Emancipation Act (1833), 56 76, 89n2, 89n7, 104-105, 111n46
Emigrants' Journal, 105 Mary Barton, 11, 19n16, 66
Emigration, 7-20 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 62, 73n56,
Enfield rifle, 92, 113, 148 74n73
Engels, Friedrich, 103, 110n41, 130, Gellner, Ernest, 41n31
131, 132nl, 134n39, 178nl A General Sketch of the History of
The Communist Manifesto, 6n6 Persia, 118
The First Indian War of Gibbon, Edward, 26
Independence, 6n7 Gikandi, Simon, 25, 40n14
English Homes in India, 1857, 150-51 Oilman, Sander L., 95, 109nl5
The Examiner, 44, 68 Gissing, George, 34, 36, 37, 41n40
Erickson, Charlotte, 19n2 Gladstone, William Ewart, 75
Ethnological Society, 32 Clancy, Ruth, 133n25
Evolution, 44, 58, 69, 147, 179n45 Gordon, Lady Lucie Duff, 127
Exeter Hall, 44, 46, 67, 68, 157, 164 Gordon Riots, 129
Eyre Defence League, 164, 168 Gore, Catherine, 129
Eyre, Governor Edward, 129, 147, 158, Great Exhibition, 26-30, 47, 75, 76, 96,
159, 161-168, 172, 178nl4, 179n28, 97, 99, 101, 103, 104, 109n20,
179n45 109n21,111n45,142
India Display, 52
Fagin, Bob, 37-38 Great Exhibition Catalogue, 41n23,
Fanon, Frantz, 147 41n27, 97, 98, 109n25, 109n29,
Farrell, J.G., 141 109n30, 117, 147
Faulkner, Peter, 40n8 Great Exhibition Executive Committee,
Fenianism, 164, 172, 175, 177, 180n49 4
Fielding, K.J., 6n9, 71n7, 72n27, 72n29, Green, Martin, 116, 132n11
72n39, 90n26, 133n35, 178n22
Fhlathuin, Mfcreni, 133n36, 145, Hansard's, 154n2, 155n4, 155n5, 155n6,
155n20 156n38
Fleet Prison, 82 Harkness, Margaret, 31
Foley, John, 97 Harper, 41n21, 41n22
Ford, Captain, 162 Hastings, Warren, 99, 101
Ford, George H., 164, 165, 166, 178n24, Henderson, H.B., 91
179n25, 179n26 Herodutus, 115
Forster, E[dward] M[organ], 99, 142, Heuman, Gad, 159, 178n5, 178n6,
147, 155n27 178n7, 178nl3
A Passage to India, 143 Hibbert, Christopher, 40n13, 41n42,
Forster, John, 1, 39, 41n46, 51, 52, 63, 41n43, 41n44, 108, 108n6, 155n8
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 23,40n5, 40n7, Jamaican Revolt, see Morant Bay

49, 71nl9 Rebellion
Hobsbawm, Eric, 147, 154, 155n25, James, Lawrence, 108n4, 108n5,
156n44 110n33, 110n40, 135, 145, 154n3,
Hodges, William, 101 155n7, 155n21
Hogarth, Georgina, 180n47 Jameson, Fredric, 37, 41n41
Holland, Lady, 70nl Jeffery, Lord Francis, 22
Holt, Thomas C., 161, 178nl2 Jenyns, Soame, 44, 71n5
Hospital for Sick Children, 128 Disquisition on the Chain of
Hughes, Robert, 17, 20n34 Universal Being, 44
Hungry Forties, 27 Jerrold, Blanchard, 38-39, 41n45
Hunt, Robert, 44 Jerrold, Douglas, 26
Huttenback, Robert A., 3, 6n8, 110n42 Jerrold, William Blanchard, 77, 89n8
Huxley, T.H., 163 'John Company', see East India
Company
Illustrated London News, 76, 84, 98, 99, Johnson, Edgar, 41n32, 82, 89n21
102, 109n22, 109n23, 114, 132n5, Jones, Sir William
140, 142, 144, 146, 155nl5 Jordan, John O., 19n20
India, 2, 3, 23, 51, 149, 150
Abolition of Sati, 92 Kaplan, Fred, 6nl
Asiatik Society of Bengal, 99 Keay, John, 101, 110n34
Bibighar, 92, 120, 126, 127, 143 Kemble, Mrs, 179n36
Bombay Army, 139 Kerr, Paul, 81n4, 89nl9
Cawnpore, 5, 92, 104, 113, 114, Kettel, Samuel, 22
119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 131, Kettle, Tilly, 101
139, 140, 143, 150 Khan, Ali, 152
Empress of India, 95, 150 Khanum, Hussani, 152
Hindu Widow Re-marriage Act, 92 Kingsley, Charles, 75, 163
India Act, 91 Kipling, Rudyard, 147
Indian Army, 59 Kim, 147
Indian 'Mutiny', 3, 4, 29, 64, 70, Knight, H.L., 74n74
75, 91-156, 164, 165, 166 Knox, Robert, 147
Lucknow, 104, 129, 131, 135, 150 Koh-I-Noor, 99, 102
Madras Army, 139 Kooiman, Dirk, 110n44, 132n9
Mughal Dynasty, 95, 118 Kriegel, Lara, 98-99, 109n26, 109n28
Santal Uprising, 119
Sati, 101 Lai, Shu-Fang, 71n7
International Anti-Slavery Convention, Lansbury, Coral, 12, 19nl8, 19nl9
43 Laurie, Sir Peter, 83
Ireland, 1, 5, 8, 50, 172, 173 Law of Settlement, 78
Famine, 7, 9, 176 Lawrence, Sir John, 144, 148
Home Rule, 175 Lawrence, T.E., 39
Irving, Washington, 66 Layard, Austen Henry, 82
Levine, George, 16, 20n32
Jacobson, Wendy S. 19n21 Liberia, 54
Jacob's Island, 83 Lindfors, Bernth, 65, 73n66
Jackson, T.A., 47 Linnaeus, Carl, 43, 44
Jamaica Committee, 162 Systerna Naturae, 44
Jamaica Papers, 163, 178n15, 178nl6, Linton, Eliza Lynn (see Lynn, Eliza)
178nl7, 178nl9 Litvack, Leon, 9, 19n10, 173, 180n46
Index 207
Livingstone, Dr David, 95, 164 Miller, Hugh, 44

Locke, John, 39 Miller, J. Hillis, 29, 41n30
Lodge, David, 10, 19nl4 Milton, J.L., 44
Lohrli, Anne, 71n20, 74n80, 117, Mirror of Parliament, 96
132nl2, 132nl3, 132nl6, 133nl9 Mitford, Miss, 111n46
London, 2, 13, 16, 17, 23, 24, 26, 32, 38, Morant Bay Rebellion, 131, 147, 158,
43, 50, 67, 75, 78, 80, 83, 105, 127, 159, 160, 164
150, 160, 162, 170, 172, 182, 183 Morgan, Captain E.E., 87, 90n31, 169,
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 54, 179n35
72n32, 72n33, 72n34, 108 Morgentaler, Goldie, 96, 109nl8
Longmore, Thomas, 83, 90n24 Morley, Henry, 64, 73n63, 74n68, 77,
Lorimer, Douglas, 178n2 78, 80, 89n10, 89n13, 89nl6
Lushington, Stephen, 55 Morning Journal, 163
Lyell, Charles, 44, 147, 163 Mughals, see India
Geographical Evidence, 44 Murray, Eustace Clare Grenville, 89n8
Lyons' Newspaper, 162, 163 Murray, Stuart Fletcher, 133n36,
Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, 113, 114, 132n2 155n20
Lynn, Eliza, 77, 89n9 Muspratt, Sheridan, 116, 132n8
Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 2, 12
Napier, General Sir Charles, 92, 93
Macaulay Thomas Babbington, 55, 165 Napoleonic Wars, 77
Mackenzie, Major Colin, 101 Narrative of the Niger Expedition, 68
Macready, W.C., 52 Nayder, Lillian, 4, 6n10, 125, 133n30
Malchow, H.L., 163, 178n21 Newton, Isaac, 44, 70
Mara, Miriam O'Kane, 183, 184n5, New York Herald, 163
184n7 New Zealand, 7
Markham, Sir Clements Robert 117-118, Nicholas I, Tsar, 75-76, 77, 78
132nl7, 132nl8 Nicholson, Brigadier John, 94
Marryat, Captain Frederick, 57 Nineveh, 38
Marshalsea Prison, 39 Norman Conquest, 25
Martineau, Harriet, 44, 49, 52, 54, 55, Northampton Mercury, 46, 71n11
56, 65, 71n21, 72n32, 72n40, 72n41,
93, 108n2, 109n7 O'Connell, Daniel, 22
British Rule in India, 108n2, 109n7 Oddie, William, 64, 94, 95, 109n14, 129,
Illustrations of Political Economy, 130, 164
49 Ojibbeway Indians, see America
Poor Laws and Paupers, 49 Oppenlander, Ella Ann, 90n30, 179n30
Society in America, 49 Osborne, Mrs Bernal, 173, 180n48
Marx, Karl, 2, 103, 110n41, 130, 131, Owen, Professor Richard, 179n45
132nl, 134n39, 178nl
The Communist Manifesto, 6n6 Page, Norman, 41n30
The First Indian War of Palmer, Alan, 89n5, 89nl9, 90n34
Independence, 6n7 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd
Mayhew, Henry, 2, 31, 34 Viscount, 76, 84
McClintock, Anne, 41n31 Pant, Dhundu, see Sahib, Nana
Mead, Henry, 140 Parkinson, Joseph Charles, 170
Mill, James, 101 Paton, Joseph Noel, 145, 146
History of British India, 5 In Memoriam, 145, 146
Mill, John Stuart, 49, 65, 163, 172, 173, Patten, Robert L., 22, 40n5, 40n6
179n44 Paxton, Joseph, 4, 26, 28
Paxton, Nancy L., 110 Ranger, Terence, 147, 154, 155n25,

Perera, Suvendrini, 59 156n44
Peters, Laura, 123, 125, 133n27, 133n28, Reade, Charles, 12
133n29 Redcliffe, Stratford de, 76, 86
Phillips, Watts, 32, 41n33 Reynolds, Captain, 98
Plunkett, John, 40n4 Reynolds' Newspaper, 9
Poe, Edgar Allen, 71n22 Reform Act (1832), 46
Poor Law Amendment Act, 45 Report of the Commissioners for the
Pope-Hennessy, Una, 6n4 Investigation of Torture, 107
Punch, 26, 29, 32, 34, 41n29, 41n34, 47, Reform Act (1867), 5, 157-177
49, 52, 56, 57, 58, 67, 68, 71nl4, Rhodes, Cecil, 182
71nl5, 72n42, 72n47, 72n48, 73n65, Richards, Thomas, 41nl7
74n78, 78, 93, 99, 107, 108, 109n8, Ricks, Christopher, 156n32
110n31, 111n31, 111n52, 111n54, Ridley, James, 1
114, 136, 145, 148, 158, 172 Roberts, Lieutenant Frederick, (later
'A Gap in the Great Exhibition', 29 Field Marshal Earl), 146, 155n23
'America in Crystal', 47 Robertson, John, 132n7
'The Black Marseillaise', 57 Robinson, Jane, 93, 109n9, 155n22
'A Black Statue to Thomas Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 66, 74n73
Carlyle', 73n65 Royal Society, 99
'The Great Indian Bean-Stalk', 108 Rue, Emile de la, 109n13, 126, 127,
'How to Make and Indian Pickle', 133n34, 151
93, 109n8 Ruskin, John, 163
'The Last Night in the Crystal Russell, Charles William, 107, 111n53
Palace', 99 Russell, Lord John, 45, 68, 76, 83
'A Nigger Professor of Russell, William Howard, 5, 83, 89n20,
Cramanology', 57 106, 108nl, 128, 129, 130, 133n36,
'Nigger Peculiarities', 72n42 134n37, 140, 143, 155nl4, 173
'Our Indian Commission', 111n51
'A Pull at the Pagoda Tree', 108 Sahib, Nana, 92
'The Question as Touching India', Said, Edward W. 1, 6n2, 39, 86, 101, 181
111n52 Orientalism, 39
'Sensational Savages', 32 Sala, George Augustus, 77, 89n11,
'The Shadow of English Liberty in 89nl2
America', 47 Samuel, Raphael, 40nl
'Specimens from Mr Punch's Sanders, Andrew, 133n26
Industrial Exhibition', 32 Sati, see India
'Thoughts on the Savage Lions of Scotland, 8
London', 67-68 Scott, Paul, 99, 147
'Vengeance, or the Bengal Tiger', The Raj Quartet, 143
145 Scott, Peter, 21, 40n2
'What Gammon!', 111n54 Semmel, Bernard, 1, 6n3, 158, 168, 172,
'Yankee Doodle in 1851', 47 178n4, 178n20, 179n42, 179n45
Pykett, Lyn, 181, 184nl Sen, Snigdha, 155n6, 155n10, 155n11
Shah, Nadir, 118
'Quickens, Quarles' (pseudonym), 50, Shakespeare, William, 44, 70
51, 71n22, 105, 111n47 Sharpe, Jenny, 110n32, 120, 133n21,
152, 154nl, 156n43
Rachel, 57 Sharad, Paul, 160, 178n8, 178n9,
Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, 59, 73n51 178n10, 178n11
Index 209
Showalter, Elaine, 133n20 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 96

Sidney, John, 12, 19n6, 19nl7, 19n23, The Newcomes, 96
20n24, 52 Theophrastus, 115
Sidney, Samuel, 12, 13, 72n26 Thomson, David, 9, 19n9
Slavery, 43-70, 71nl 1, 72n38, 73n67, Thomson, James, 121, 133n23
74n75, 74n79, 105, 160, 168 Thompson, Thomas Richard Hey wood,
Smith, Anthony, 21, 25, 40n3, 40nl5 68
Smith, Sheila M, 64, 73n59 The Times, 76, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90n25, 91,
Soyer, Alexis, 89nl9 105, 116, 126, 128, 140, 146
Spivak, Gayatri Chakvravorty, 61, Townsend, E[dward?], 117, 132nl2,
73n54, 73n55 132nl4, 132nl5
The Standard, 65, 66, 71nl1 Transportation, see Australia.
Stanley, Edward, 43 Trevelyan, G. M., 120, 133n22, 152,
Stanley, Joachim, 184n4 156n41, 156n42
Steel, Flora Annie, 141 Trilling, Lionel, 83, 90n22
Stepan, Nancy, 56, 72n44 Trollope, Frances, 47, 49, 70n2, 71nl7,
Stephen, Sir George, 46, 54, 55, 71n11, 71nl8
72n36 True Sun, 96
Stephen, Leslie, 75, 89n3 Turner, Mary, 159
Dictionary of National Biography
Stone, Frank, 90n27 Underbill, Dr Edward Bean, 161
Stone, Harry, 66, 73n67, 74n72 Urania Cottage, 7, 12, 37
Stonehouse, J.H., 71n6 Urquhart, David, 155n4
Stowe, Professor Calvin, 157
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 52, 54, 65, 66, Victoria, Queen, 21, 25, 26, 76, 95, 102,
72n35, 73n63, 73n67, 74n74, 157, 170 150, 161
Sunny Memories of a Foreign Land, Vrettos, Athena, 142, 155nl3
66
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 65, 67, 71n11, Warren, Samuel, 104, 110n43
72n35, 73n63, 74n75, 74n79, 170 Watson, Mrs Richard, 29, 41n26, 41n28,
Suleri, Sara, 141, 143, 155nl2 66, 74n69, 78, 89nl5, 125, 133n31
Swift, Jonathan, 177 Weld, Theodore, 53
Slavery as it is, 53
Tasmania, 7 West, Shearer, 41n35, 46, 67, 71nlO,
Taylor, Henry, 161 74n77
Taylor, Philip Meadows, 109nl7, 141, Wheatley, Phyllis, 57
182 Wheeler, General Sir Hugh, 151, 152
Confessions of a Thug, 109nl7, 182 Wheeler, Miss Ulrika, 151, 152, 153
Seeta, 141 Whewell, William, 102-103, 105,
Temple Bar, 133nl9 110n37
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 75, 88, 148, Wilberforce, William, 55
150, 156n32, 156n39 William III (of Orange), 149
'The Charge of the Light Brigade', William IV, King, 103
88 Williams, Eric, 70n3
'The Defence of Lucknow', 150, Williams, Raymond, 2
156n39 The Country and the City, 6n5
Idylls of the King, 156n32 Wills, W.H., 14, 20n25, 28, 41n25,
Maud, 88 72n40, 85, 90n27, 157, 178n3
Ternan, Ellen, 126 Wilson, Edmund, 182, 184n3
Tewaree, Myoor, 152 Wilson, Forrest, 66
Yates, Edmund, 89nll Zavala, Iris M., 102, 110n36

Young England, 25 Ziegler, Garrett, 94, 109n11, 123
Young, Robert J.C., 101, 110n35 Zulu Kafir Exhibition, 65

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DICKENS AND EMPIRE

To Fay Moore and Sandra Moore, with love and gratitude

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3412-6 (hbk)

1 Emigration, Transportation, and the Problem of Closure 7

3 The Racial Other 43

4 Red Tape and Circumlocution: The Crimean War 75

5 'How to Make an India Pickle' 91

6 A Tale of Three Revolutions: Dickens's Response to the

7 Containing Cawnpore: The Reinvention and Reinterpretation

8 The 1860s and the Decline of the Discourse 157

2.2 'Specimens from Mr. Punch's Industrial Exhibition of 1850'.

3.1 'The Land of Liberty'.

4.1 'A Struggle Between Duty and Inclination'.

5.1 Detail from The Illustrated London News Grand Diorama

7.1 'The Asiatic Mystery'.

7.2 'Justice'. Punch. 12 September 1857. 109.

7.3 'British Homes in India, 1857'.

7.4 'Miss Wheeler Defending Herself Against the Sepoys'.

8.1 'How Not To Do It'. Punch. 12 October 1867.

Emigration, Transportation, and the

Martin Chuzzlewit shows the life of the emigrant to be a perilous existence of

novels, an expedient means of providing the conventional 'happy ending'

However, the social background of the criminal is remarkably similar to that of

responsibility for anything seem to be a spilling over of the devastation of the

1 Charles Wentworth Dilke. Greater Britain: A record of Travel in English-Speaking

24 [Samuel Sidney] 'Letters of Introduction to Sydney'. 188.

questions coming from innocuous comic figures. As if to demonstrate the ongoing

representations of the dispossessed, moreover, endeavoured to subvert the nation's

The Icon of the Nation

By 1851 Britain's growing emphasis on national identity had assumed a physical

imagination the Crystal Palace metamorphosed into the epitome of such

overwhelming in the extreme:

Dickens's Two Nations

It is extremely difficult to define Dickens's exact stance in relation to the urban

'home-made article' seems to be deliberately adopting the rhetoric of the Great

THE SHIPWBECKED MINISTERS SAVED BY THE GREAT EXHIBITION STEAMER.

2.1 'The Shipwrecked Ministers Saved by the Great Exhibition

SPECIMENS FBOM MR PUNCH'S INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION OF 1850,

2.2 "Specimens from Mr. Punch's Industrial Exhibition of 1850'. Punch.

Dickens's attempts to assert a community based on nationality and his recognition

Jerrold's account of the preparations is evocative of Edward Said's descriptions in

17 Thomas Richards. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and

The Racial Other

Slavery and Abolition

jingoistic fascination with territorial acquisitions in the years following 1870.

3.1 'The Land of Liberty'. Punch. Volume 13,1847. 215.

fallacious ideas of equality, which are so fondly cherished by the working

is an appropriate punishment for the outrages against humanity committed on the

were perpetuated as a means of justifying slavery. So successful was this

had to be upheld by real or imagined behavioural quirks, many of which were a

Representing the Other

is, insistent on non-linguistic signs—pictures, pantomime, Cicero's own body to

The Noble Savage

piece that sheds light on Dickens's disapproval of the spectacle of savagery

4 Peter Fryer. 'Psuedo-Scientific Racism'. Anti-Racist Science Teaching. Dawn Gill

50 John Bowen. Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. Oxford: Oxford University

Red Tape and Circumlocution: