III. A LONG ROAD TOWARDS ABOLITION
3. Child Labour: a Literary Subject
which provided to English people a new vision of children's situation, but also in the freedom of press, finally allowed during the second half of the century. Thus, the last and following part deals with these authors. Now we shall wonder who they were, what role did they play in the fight for children's right, and how people have perceived their work through the centuries.
Boy's Progress, first published as a serial between 1837 and 1839, and then as a novel. In this story child labour issue is directly highlighted, as well as juvenile delinquency and children's daily life in workhouses. As reading was not spread yet among the working-class around the middle of the century, he principally addressed his novels to the middle-class and the upper-class. Through dramatic and sombre stories, Charles Dickens informed them on the living standard and working conditions of working-class children. We can suppose that these stories brought wealthier people to understand children's distress and acted to protect them, by financially contributing to schooling, or by using their influence in the high society. Introducing Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress, Charles Dickens announces that his aim was to impact most of people. He says: “It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really do exist; to paint them in all their deformity; in all the squalid poverty of their lives; to show them as they really are;[...]would be to attempt a something which was greatly needed, and which could be a service to society. And therefore, I did it as I best could.49” Thereby, considering the uncountable number of copies of Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress sold in the last hundred years, it appears that Charles Dickens' determination has been highly effective. In a research on the making of Victorian England, historian Herbert Schlossberg declares that “Dickens' novel and the miseries of industrial England have been impressed in the minds of millions of people who read him.50” Indeed, Charles Dickens's literature impacted nineteenth century people, but also has enjoyed an enormous popularity, lasting nowadays. Therefore, it would be interesting to understand how the writer manages to captivate so many people's mind.
Inherited from romanticism and realism, Charles Dickens' stories have a double origin. They took place in both reality and fiction. Historians disagree on the purpose. Some argue that Charles Dickens' stories are fictional exaggeration51. Others say that these stories exactly reflected Victorian reality. Indeed, London writer and historian Judith Flanders argues that: “Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvelous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.52” It is obvious that misery and child labour existed in the Victorian era. However, through the plot and writing process, Charles Dickens depicts fictional characters, in a fictional reality. This is the case in the novel Oliver Twist or the Parish Boy's Progress. As we explained previously, the story was inspired by a real boy, Robert Blincoe, who is Oliver Twist in the story. Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist was an orphan who grew up in a baby farm near London, and was early sent to a workhouse, for working as a scavenger under the supervision of Mr Bumble. One day at dinner, he dared to ask for more food and was consequently sold to a chimney sweep master. But a kind magistrate sympathized with the child and did not sign the indenture. Therefore
49 Dickens, Charles. The Adventure of Oliver Twist, Boston : Ticknor and fields, 1866, p.vi. Print.
50 Schlossberg, Herbert. The Silent Revolution and the Making of Victorian England. Columbus : Ohio Press University, 2000, p.161. Print.
51 Bloom, Harold. John Irving. New-York : Infobase Publishing, 2001, p.91. Print.
52 Flanders, Judith. The Victorian City : Everyday life in Dicken's London.London : Atlantic Book, 2012, p.94. Print.
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he did not become a chimney sweep, but a mourner for M. Sowerberry, an undertaker. After a fight between him and an apprentice, he was dismissed and fled to London where he was victim of a gang of juvenile pick-pockets.
The leaders were the boys Fagin and the Artful Dodgers. Then, Oliver went in various adventures ( kidnapping, robbery) and was finally adopted by rich people he was supposed to rob: Mrs and Mr Brownlow53.
Social concerns of the Victorian society are also recurrent in the the story's context. Such is the case for poverty, child labour, indenture system, juvenile delinquency or again, the deep misery in which children lived in workhouses. For instance, the episode in which Oliver asked for some food is relevant of the children's situation in workhouses. Indeed, to Oliver's request the overseers responded: “That boy will be hanged!54” As we know, he was not hung but a reward of five pounds was offered, “to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business, or calling.55” Then is made a reference to chimney sweeping when the cruel sweep master Mr.
Gramfield explains the way to dislodge a child tucked into a narrow flue. He says: “There's nothing like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down with a run.56” There is no proof whether masters really did that or not. Yet, overseers' cruelty in the novel appears realistic. Another event recalls us reality in the tale. At the end, Fagin is accused of murder and promised to the gallows. This is not fiction. Indeed, as we said earlier, children could be hanged from seven-year-old in England. It seems that Charles Dickens provided numerous real details on child workers and juvenile delinquents' harsh life during the Victorian period. Consequently, the story can be seen through a realistic point of view. Readers can identify themselves to the characters. Modern English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton argues that Oliver Twist “was popular not because it was an unreal world, but because it was a real world; a world in which the soul could live. Dickens did what no English statesman, perhaps, has really done, he called out the people.57”Nonetheless, the romantic dimension is as essential as the realistic one. What is obviously romantic in the tale is the fact that characters are idealized. The good ones are totally good, such as Oliver Twist, the magistrate who refuses to sign the indenture, or the Brownlows. The evil ones are really bad and nasty like Fagin or Mr Bumble. Characters being both evil and good are rare. Furthermore, Oliver starts to work while he is nine-year-old as a scavenger. We explained previously in the research that scavengers were the younger boys hired in factories, and started to work from four and five-year-old. Here the English society of the nineteenth century is not described as harsh as it was. The end of the tale is romanticized by the fact that Oliver is adopted by a nice family, which finally appears to be his own family. The plot is here improbable and unrealistic.
In the real Victorian society, we can suppose Oliver would have been mistreated by the chimney sweep master, as another magistrate could have accepted to sign the indenture. Perhaps he would have died of starvation, or been murdered by Fagin's gang, or simply been beaten at the beginning of the story when he says: “Please, Sir, I want
53 Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, London :Penguin Classics, 2010. Print.
54 Dickens, Charles. The Adventure of Oliver Twist, Boston : Ticknor and fields, 1866, p.12. Print.
55 Dickens, Charles. The Adventure of Oliver Twist, Boston : Ticknor and fields, 1866, p.13. Print.
56 Dickens, Charles. The Adventure of Oliver Twist, Boston : Ticknor and fields, 1866, p.17. Print.
57 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. Charles Dickens. Hertfordshire:Wordsworth Editions, 2007, p.51. Print.
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some more.58” Thus, romanticism transforms realistic situations in the tale. The dramatic aspect of the text is therefore emphasized and the story becomes more poignant. Besides, evil characters are glamorized so that readers sympathize with them. Such is the case for Fagin, the nasty boy who wishes Oliver harm. At the end of the story, when Oliver goes and visits him in prison, Fagin is described as an unfortunate and insane child. Thereby, readers are deeply emotionally impacted by Oliver Twist's sad story. Given the fact that romanticism is as much present as realism in the novel, it seems hard to say which one is the most important. American professor of literature and theatre, Paul Kuritz, argues that “the last great character in English romantic literature, Charles Dickens, had one foot in the next age's realism. 59”
Through the realist dimension of the novel, Charles Dickens shocked and informed English society of the needs of reforming child employment, early in the century. The romantic dimension fixed a Victorian stereotype that has lasted up to now: Oliver Twist, the endangered child labourer in need of protection. Thus literary duality enabled Charles Dickens to play an important role in the abolition of child labour. Consequently, child labour was what historian Edward Palmer Thompson denounces as “one of the most shameful events60” of the Victorian era.
Oliver Twist or the Parish Boy's Progress is Charles Dickens' most famous novel but it is not the only one in which the author deals with childhood. Indeed, in 1848 was published the novel Dombey and Sons. It relates the story of the Dombey family. The complexity of family relations is highlighted through a representation of working-class' conditions of living, misery and work. Four years later the novel David Copperfield was published.
This time, the novel depicts the difficult childhood of David Copperfield, a Victorian child. In the same period, other novelists focused on child labour. The first industrial novel published in England had been written by a Tory woman, Frances Trollope, in 1850. It was entitled The Life and Adventure of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy.
Inspired by John Brown's A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, she depicts the childhood of a boy called Michael Armstrong, who works in a factory in Manchester. In the story the blame is placed on capitalists who exploit children not on Michael's parents. Indeed, the factory system separates Michael from the domestic sphere. The abuse of child employment in early Victorian era are then largelyemphasized in her work. Some historians argue that Frances Trollope's literature was politically engaged. American professor of British history, Rosemarie Bodenheimer labels The Life and Adventure of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy a “Tory-paternalist novel written in support of the Ten Hours' Movement.61” Indeed, Frances Trollope campaigned for the reformation of working-class destitution and child labour. But because she was a woman and politically engaged, she had to face
58 Dickens, Charles. The Adventure of Oliver Twist, Boston : Ticknor and fields, 1866, p.13. Print.
59 Kuritz, Paul. The Making of Theatre History. Saddle River, New-Jersey :Prentice Hall Edition, 1988,p.265. Print.
60 Schuster, Selina. An Analysis of Childhood and Child Labour in Charles Dickens' works. Hamburg : Anchor Academic Publishing, 2001, p.53. Print.
61 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie.The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction,New-York : Cornell University Press, 1991, p.26. Print.
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numerous critics. Numerous critics and historians claim that she exaggerates too much the dreadful working-class situation. Modern reviewer Jessica Menzo, argues that the story of Michael Armstrong is “an exaggerated statement of the vices of a class, and a mischievous attempt to excite the worst and bitterest feelings against men who are, like other men, creatures of circumstances, in which their lot has been cast.62” However, for others, Frances Trollope has remained in people's mind as “the most provocative female writer of the early Victorian period who used the novel to impel social change.63” Thus, we cannot deny that Frances Trollope contributed to change the people's opinion on child labour reformation. Another writer was highly concerned with child labour in England. He was the Reverend Charles Kingsley. In 1863 his novel entitled The water-babies, a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby was published in England. The novel deals with various themes including industrialization, misery, religion, redemption, and child labour. In the incipit of the novel, Charles Kingsley describes the bad working conditions of a chimney sweep called Tom, whose earnings directly serves his master.
“Once upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep, and his name was Tom. He lived in a great town in the North country, where there were plenty of chimneys to sweep, and plenty of money for Tom to earn and his master to spend[...]He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him.64”
Therefore, written as a fairy-tale, Charles Kingsley's novel shows, through a striking realism, the atrocity of child labour in Victorian England.
b. The Influence of English Novelists on the Foreign Writers.
In France, child labour literature appeared in the 1860's, as industrialization occurred later than in England. Indeed, like English novelists, French writers also broached sensitive social themes. Two authors deeply marked the French literature of the nineteenth century. The first one was Victor Hugo. In 1862, he produced a great historical fiction entitled Les Misérables. The story takes place in the South of France in the nineteenth century. The tales of several characters' life are tangled, including the one of the ex-convict Jean Valjean, victim of misery, and Cosette, a poor girl entrusted to the care of a rapacious and corrupted couple of bourgeois, Mrs and Mr Thénardier and their two daughters. In their house, the girl is mistreated and obliged to work. Then, she is sold to Jean Valjean like if she was a commodity. Furthermore, another young character is emblematic of child labour.
He is the Parisian urchin named Gavroche, employed as a chimney sweep. Here, Victor Hugo obviously creates a
62 Menzo, Jessica. Ninetheenth Century Literature Criticism. Farmington Hill : Gale Publishing, 2002, p.118. Print.
63 Ayres, Brenda. Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change, Westport : Greenwood Publishing, 2002, p.36. Print.
64 Kingsley, Charles. The Water-babies : A fairy Tale for a Land Baby. Austin : European Publishing, 2011, p.1. Print.
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stereotype. Indeed, Bertrand Thaithe, professor of Cultural History at the University of Manchester underlines that
“Victor Hugo had made of Gavroche the streetwise revolutionary boy, a stereotype of all revolutionary boyhood.65” Therefore,Victor Hugo's novel deeply impacted French people as it points out the misery of the French working-class people, child labour, and politics. Like in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, the novel is both deeply realistic and romantic. Victor Hugo appears as the first French novelist who focused on child labour.
American professor Marva Barnett argues that “Hugo gave children a status they had not had before, pointing out in his notes for a speech against child labor that they were not even capable of understanding the laws that made their lives miserables.66” Thus, as if following Charles Dickens example, in the 1860's, Victor Hugo became the novelist precursor of child labour literature in France. In 1885, Emile Zola published his novel Germinal. He devoted the tale to point out the harshness of miners' life in the far North of France, in a town called Montsou. The story is based on a captivating realism. The plot develops in a mining community, around the character of Etienne Lantier, a miner immigrant. Thanks to the character of the young Catherine, the novel provides a detailed example of child labour in mines at the end of the century in France. Like his predecessors, Emile Zola's novel deals with many topics such as industrialization, mining strikes, politics, love affairs and manifestly, child labour. Thus, Germinal is part of the literary tradition of the child labour novel.
c. A Poetic Vision of Child Workers' Ordeal.
Another form of literature was widespread during the nineteenth century. Indeed, poetry was another artistic way to denounce child labour. Poets started to write on child employment as early as the Industrial Revolution. The majority of them highlighted excessively and violently the consequences of the employment of children by industrialists. One of the most famous poem devoted to chimney-sweeping had been written by William Blake in 1789. The poem was deeply engaged. It was entitled The Chimney-sweeper: When my mother died I was very young. Six stanzas recounts the dream of a chimney-sweep. His dream is to be freed from the cruel work. The misery in which the boy lives is also highlighted. The first quatrain introduces the child fate:
“When my mother died I was very young And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.67”
65 Taithe, Bertrand. Citizenship and Wars:France in Turmoil 1870-1871. New-York:Routledge, 2003, p.191. Print.
66 Barnett Marva. Victor Hugo on Things that Matter : a Reader.Yale : Yale University Press, 2014, p.360.
Print.
67 Fuller, David. William Blake : Semlected Poetry and Prose. New-York : Pearson Education Publishing, 2000, p.62/63. Print.
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That poem had been largely known thanks to that first stanza, who ironically exposes child labourers ineluctable situation. Indeed, here William Blake points out the fact that children were obliged to work, and went to work too early. Instead of calling 'sweep' in the streets, the young boy of the poem can scarcely cry “weep! Weep! Weep!
Weep!”. These shocking lines had enabled the poet to open people's eyes on the necessity to regulate child labour.
Here William Blake crystallizes the vision of childhood as a time of innocence and joy. However, it did not have a great impact on politics.
Industrialization in the following century gave birth to poets more engaged again. Indeed, in 1819, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet from the Devon, largely supported Robert Peel's Factory Act, publishing works in which chimney sweeps were compared to black slaves. It is said that “Seeing children as slaves opened people's eyes. It changed perceptions and a mass campaign against child labour grew steadily in power. But is was the little black boy who made that insight possible. On the back of the crippled chimney sweep, a successful rhetoric of a movement of social change was carried.68”Robert Southey, an English romantic writer, supported Michael Sadler, in 1833 and contributed to the vote of the Factory Act. Indeed, in 1832, he denounces the English industry of exploiting children. He explains that “a new sort of slave-trade was invented; a set of child-jobbers traveled the country, procuring children from parents whose poverty was such as would consent to the sacrifice, and undertaking to feed, clothe, and lodge them for the profits of their labor.69” Here Robert Southey give a pragmatic and realistic point of view on child-trade. From the beginning of the Victorian era, there were numerous poets who disagreed with romantic novelists' vision of child employment. They judged it as being too much glamorized. For instance, in 1836, Caroline Norton, an English poet, writer ad feminist, wrote a typical example of realistic poem about factory workers. In A Voice From the Factory, she exposes a child's daily life. Stanza XLVIII remains a striking example of children's working conditions:
“These then are his Companions: he, too young To share their base and saddening merriment, Sits by: his little head in silence hung;
His limbs cramped up; his body weakly bent;
Toiling obedient, till long hours so spent Produce Exhaustion's slumber, dull and deep.
The Watcher's stroke,–bold–sudden–violent,–
Urges him from that lethargy of sleep,
And bids him wake to Life,–to labour and to weep!70”
68 Fulford, Tim, Lee Debbie and Kitson Peter. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era:
Bodies of Knowledge. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2004, p.250. Print.
69 Harris, Ronald Walter. Romanticism and the Social Order. New-York : Barnes and Noble, 1969, p.266.
Print.
70 Shea, Victor. Victorian Literature, An Anthology. Hoboken : John Willey and Sons Publishing, 2014, p.186. Print.
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