Robert Giddings, who was Professor of Communication and Culture at Bournemouth University, is a broadcaster and literary critic who writes regularly for Tribune reviewing radio programmes, classical music and books. An expert on the life and work of Charles Dickens, and editor of a new edition of Bleak House (Atlantic Books, £8.99) he reflects here on Dickens and Honourable Members in the light of the current scandal of MPs caught with their snouts in the trough.
BOZ began his writing career as a political reporter for the Morning Chronicle during the struggle for the first Reform Bill in the early 1830s and he observed electioneering at close quarters (an experience he put to good use in The Pickwick Papers). Though he sympathised with the poor and downtrodden, he had little hope in social reform through Parliament or organised labour and, influenced by Thomas Carlyle, dreaded the pressure for reform that might lead politics to erupt onto the streets. Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities manifest these anxieties. During the political crisis brought on by the Whig government’s incompetence in the 1850s he wrote in a letter (April 10 1855) that “smouldering discontent…a bad harvest…aristocratic insolence or incapacity, a defeat abroad” could easily turn into conflagration.
He also feared the latent violence of Chartism and served as a Special Constable during the Chartist crisis of 1848. Hard Times shows his misgivings about trade unionism and thus it is difficult to align him politically.
He abhorred Tories, although he grew to admire Robert Peel after Corn Law reform in 1846: “I little thought that I should ever live to praise Peel, but Disraeli and that dunghill Lord Bentinck have so disgusted me that I feel disposed to champion him.” His novels frequently testify to his loathing of the aristocracy yet he grew to admire Wellington, a reactionary old Tory if ever there was one, describing him as “a great old man” although the lavish expense of Wellington’s funeral appalled him.
The radical, compassionate and reforming zeal of Dickens’ spirit cannot be denied. During the fiasco of the Crimean War he was a leading figure in the Administrative Reform Association and his speech to the association on June 27 1855 wonderfully expresses his ire at the situation. In the same year he wrote four vigorous attacks on Parliamentary incompetence – The Thousand and One Humbugs, The Toady Tree, Cheap Patriotism and Our Commission – which were published in Household Words.
He originally intended for Mr Dombey to have a career in Parliament but dropped the idea; nevertheless we do have a pompous MP in Nicholas Nickleby “with a loud voice, a pompous manner, a tolerable command of sentences with no meaning in them, and in short every requisite for a very good MP indeed” who glibly refers to “this great and free and happy country”.
So I wonder what he’d make of our present crop of Honourable Members and their claims on the public purse for moat-cleaning, tampons, bath plugs, lightbulbs and crafty house sales.
New Labour’s fascination with the stinking rich would have stuck in his craw. The arch swindler Merdle in Bleak House is straight out of today’s headlines. “Mr Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, President of the other.” And, like our modern bankers and other financial wizards, Merdle socialized with the great and the good: “There were magnates from the Court and magnates from the City, magnates from the Commons and magnates from the Lords, magnates from the bench and magnates from the bar, Bishop magnates, Treasury magnates, Horse Guard magnates, Admiralty magnates – all the magnates that keep us going, and sometimes trip us up.”
MPs were dustmen, in Dickens’ view, and Parliament was the national dustheap. In Little Dorrit he gives us recognisable portraits of the parliamentary breed, including: “One who had leaped through twenty places in quick succession, and was always in two or three at once, and who was the much-respected inventor of an art which he practised with great success and admiration in all governments. This was, when he was asked a Parliamentary question on any one topic, to return an answer on any other. It had done immense service, and brought him into high esteem.”
And he describes parliamentary behaviour we’d all recognise: “They did all their hearing, and ohing, and cheering, and barking, under directions…and they put dummy motions on the paper in the way of other men’s motions; and they staved disagreeable subjects off until late in the night and late in the session, and then with virtuous patriotism cried out that it was too late…and they fetched and carried, toadied and jobbed, and corrupted, and ate heaps of dirt, and were indefatigable in the public service.”
Professor John Sutherland believes that Dickens would have voted for Tony Blair. Yeah, right.
