Chapter XIII: Community

While the opinions of Dickens on the subject of community may not seem very advanced to some of the most progressive men and women of the present, they were much ahead of his own time, and they are beyond the practice of our time.

I have had my share of sorrows--more than the common lot, perhaps, but
I have borne them ill. I have broken where I should have bent; and
have mused and brooded, when my spirit should have mixed with all
God's great creation. The men who learn endurance are they who call
the whole world brother. I have turned _from_ the world, and I pay the
penalty.

Thus spoke Mr. Haredale to Edward Chester, in Barnaby Rudge.

No one who has lived since the time of Dickens could write a more striking statement of the responsibility of every man for his brother, and of the terrific consequences of neglect of the duties of brotherhood both to him who is neglected and to him who neglects, than Dickens wrote in Dombey and Son. There is no phase of sociology that has stepped beyond the position taken by Dickens in the following selection:

Was Mr. Dombey's master vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an
unnatural characteristic? It might be worth while, sometimes to
inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether,
in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be
unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow
range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile
worship of it on the part of the few timid or designing people
standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has
never risen up upon the wings of a free mind--drooping and useless
soon--to see her in her comprehensive truth!

Alas! are there so few things in the world about us most unnatural,
and yet most natural in being so! Hear the magistrate or judge
admonish the unnatural outcast of society; unnatural in brutal habits,
unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all
distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice,
in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But
follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at
every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the
echoes of our carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement
stones. Look round upon the world of odious sights--millions of
immortal creatures have no other world on earth--at the lightest
mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the
next street, stops her ears, and lisps, "I don't believe it!" Breathe
the polluted air, foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health
and life; and have every sense conferred upon our race for its delight
and happiness, offended, sickened, and disgusted, and made a channel
by which misery and death alone can enter. Vainly attempt to think of
any simple plant, or flower, or wholesome weed that, set in this fetid
bed, could have its natural growth or put its little leaves off to the
sun as God designed it. And then, calling up some ghastly child, with
stunted form and wicked face, hold forth on its unnatural sinfulness,
and lament its being so early far away from heaven--but think a little
of its having been conceived, and born and bred, in hell!

Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the
health of man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from
vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering
in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to
corrupt the better portions of a town. But if the moral pestilence
that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of outraged nature, is
inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the
revelation! Then should we see depravity, impiety, drunkenness, theft,
murder, and a long train of nameless sins against the natural
affections and repulsions of mankind, overhanging the devoted spots,
and creeping on, to blight the innocent and spread contagion among
the pure. Then should we see how the same poisoned fountains that flow
into our hospitals and lazar houses, inundate the jails, and make the
convict ships swim deep, and roll across the seas, and overrun vast
continents with crime. Then should we stand appalled to know that
where we generate disease to strike our children down and entail
itself on unborn generations, there also we breed, by the same certain
process, infancy that knows no innocence, youth without modesty or
shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering and guilt,
blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we bear. Unnatural
humanity! When we shall gather grapes from thorns, and figs from
thistles; when fields of grain shall spring up from the offal in the
byways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat churchyards
that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity and find it
growing from such seed.

Oh, for a good spirit who would take the housetops off, with a more
potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a
Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to
swell the retinue of the destroying angel as he moves forth among
them! For only one night's view of the pale phantoms rising from the
scenes of our too long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air
where vice and fever propagate together, raining the tremendous and
social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming
thicker! Bright and blessed the morning that should rise on such a
night; for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own
making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and
eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common
origin, owing one duty to the father of one family, and tending to one
common end to make the world a better place!

Not the less bright and blessed would that day be for rousing some who
never have looked out upon the world of human life around them to a
knowledge of their own relation to it, and for making them acquainted
with a perversion of Nature in their own contracted sympathies and
estimates; as great and yet as natural in its development when once
begun as the lowest degradation known.

This selection is worth rereading. The most advanced thinkers will understand it best.

Dickens showed that he understood clearly that a man becomes marred and degraded by shutting the world out of his heart, even though the reason for the exclusion may in itself be good. Love is the highest of all sentiments, and Dickens used it in the case of Mr. Wickfield to show that even the tender love he had for his dead wife became a source of evil to him, when it made him cease to think of the sorrows of his fellows, and only of his own affliction. Either in joy or sorrow the benefit to the individual results from a deepening of his consciousness of unity with the whole of humanity. Mr. Wickfield said to David:

"Weak indulgence has ruined me. Indulgence in remembrance and
indulgence in forgetfulness. My natural grief for my child's mother
turned to disease; my natural love for my child turned to disease. I
have infected everything I touched. I have brought misery on what I
dearly love, I know--_You_ know! I thought it possible that I could
truly love one creature in the world, and not love the rest; I thought
it possible that I could truly mourn for one creature gone out of the
world, and not have some part in the grief of all who mourned. Thus
the lessons of my life have been perverted! I have preyed on my own
morbid coward heart, and it has preyed on me. Sordid in my grief,
sordid in my love, sordid in my miserable escape from the darker side
of both, oh, see the ruin I am, and hate me, shun me!"

In Tom Tiddler's Ground Dickens attacks the ideal that there may be merit in seclusion. Mr. Traveller visits the hermit who had become famous, and who was so vain on account of his dirt and simplicity of living, and he tells him some plain truths regarding himself and the duty of man to his fellow-men.

"Now," said he, "that a man--even behind bars, in a blanket and a
skewer--should tell me that he can see from day to day any orders or
conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility
teach him that it is anything but the miserablist drivelling for a
human creature to quarrel with his social nature--not to go so far as
to say, to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme
case, or who can teach him that he can in any wise separate himself
from his kind and the habits of his kind, without becoming a
deteriorated spectacle calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the
monkeys) pleasure--is something wonderful!"

"You think yourself profoundly wise," said the Hermit.

"Bah," returned Mr. Traveller, "there is little wisdom in knowing that
every man must be up and doing, and that all mankind are made
dependent on one another.

"It is a moral impossibility," continued Mr. Traveller, "that any son
or daughter of Adam can stand on this ground that I put my foot on, or
on any ground that mortal treads, and gainsay the healthy tenure on
which we hold our existence."

"Which is," sneered the Hermit, "according to you----"

"Which is," returned the Traveller, "according to Eternal Providence,
that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and
act and react on each other, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to
sit blinking in the corner."

Dickens saves Little Emily from her great sorrow, and lifts the load of "shame" from her heart by giving her the opportunity of helping to care for others.

But theer was some poor folks aboard as had illness among 'em, and she
took care of _them_; and theer was the children in our company, and
she took care of _them_; and so she got to be busy, and to be doing
good, and that helped her.

And in the same great book he ridicules the misuse of the sacred word "society" by applying it to the sham and mockery of all that should be truly helpful and ennobling in the social intercourse of mankind.

Or perhaps this _is_ the Desert of Sahara! for, though Julia has a
stately house, and mighty company, and sumptuous dinners every day, I
see no green growth near her; nothing that can ever come to fruit or
flower. What Julia calls "society," I see among it Mr. Jack Maldon,
from his Patent Place, sneering at the hand that gave it to him, and
speaking to me of the Doctor, as "so charmingly antique."

But when society is the name of such hollow gentlemen and ladies,
Julia, and when its breeding is professed indifference to everything
that can advance or can retard mankind, I think we must have lost
ourselves in the same Desert of Sahara, and had better find the way
out.

When he spoke of Little Dorrit as "inspired" he proceeded to say:

She was inspired to be something which was not what the rest were, and
to be that something, different and laborious, for the sake of the
rest. Inspired? Yes. Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a
priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the
lowliest work in the lowliest way of life!

Dickens had reached the great conception that the duty of every individual is to add something by his life to the general good. That we should not leave the world as we found it; that our work is not done well if we spend our lives in digging among the richest treasures of the past and revealing them unselfishly to our fellow-men, but that each should make some existing thing or condition better, or reveal some new thought or principle, or plan, or process, so that humanity may climb more easily and more certainly from the mists and shadows to the higher glory of the clearer light.

Mr. Doyce had made an invention, but had met with almost insuperable difficulties in getting it before the people.

"It is much to be regretted," said Clennam, "that you ever turned your
thoughts that way, Mr. Doyce."

"True, sir, true, to a certain extent. But what is a man to do? If he
has the misfortune to strike out something serviceable to the nation,
he must follow where it leads him."

"Hadn't he better let it go?" asked Clennam.

"He can't do it," said Doyce, shaking his head, with a thoughtful
smile. "It's not put into his head to be buried. It's put into his
head to be made useful. You hold your life on the condition that to
the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery
on the same terms."

"That is to say," said Arthur, with a growing admiration of his quiet
companion, "you are not fully discouraged even now?"

"I have no right to be, if I am," returned the other. "The thing is as
true as it ever was."

Throughout his writings Dickens vigorously condemns the class distinctions that separate mankind into sections, and thus destroy the bond of unity and brotherhood that should exist between them.

Miss Monflathers, in Old Curiosity Shop, drew the line very definitely between genteel children and the children of the poor.

Mr. Dombey pompously consented to have the children of the poor educated, because "it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to know their position." Fancy using education to prevent the unity of men, when its highest function should be the revelation of community and the qualification of individuals for the functions of brotherhood.

In David Copperfield the pathetic side of the evil of class distinctions is shown by the appeals of Mr. Peggotty to Mrs. Steerforth that she would consent to her son's marriage with Little Emily, and her indignant refusal to allow her son to do so.

In Bleak House Sir Leicester Dedlock was amazed at the audacity of Mr. Rouncewell's democratic ideas, and his mind was filled with gloomy forebodings of the evil that such principles as those held by Mr. Rouncewell would work in the social organization as planned and fixed by the Dedlock class. These were his thoughts:

From the village school of Chesney Wold, intact as it is this minute,
to the whole framework of society; from the whole framework of
society, to the aforesaid framework receiving tremendous cracks in
consequence of people (ironmasters, lead mistresses, and what not) not
minding their catechism, and getting out of the station unto which
they are called--necessarily and forever, according to Sir Leicester's
rapid logic, the first station in which they happen to find
themselves; and from that, to their educating other people out of
_their_ stations, and so obliterating the landmarks, and opening the
flood gates, and all the rest of it; this is the swift progress of the
Dedlock mind.

In American Notes, after describing at length the admirable co-operative arrangements, and the varied means of culture, amusement, and refinement enjoyed by the young women in the factories at Lowell, Mass., he says:

The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim with
one voice, "How very preposterous!" On my deferentially inquiring why,
they will answer, "These things are above their station." In reply to
that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is.

It is their station to work. And they _do_ work. They labour in these
mills, upon an average, twelve hours a day, which is unquestionably
work. And pretty tight work too. Perhaps it is above their station to
indulge in such amusements on any terms. Are we quite sure that we in
England have not formed our ideas of the "station" of working people
from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they
are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own
feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating
libraries, and even the Lowell Offering, startle us with their
novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right
or wrong.

For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of to-day
cheerfully done and the occupation of to-morrow cheerfully looked to,
any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable. I know
no station which is rendered more endurable to the person in it, or
more safe to the person out of it, by having ignorance for its
associate. I know no station which has a right to monopolize the means
of mutual instruction, improvement, and rational entertainment; or
which has ever continued to be a station very long, after seeking to
do so.

Walter Wilding planned an ideal relationship between employer and employed in No Thoroughfare. He advertised for a housekeeper so that he "might sit daily at the head of the table at which the people in my employment eat together, and may eat of the same roast and boiled, and drink of the same beer, and one and all form a kind of family."

He planned, too, to train his employees to sing "Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Kent, Purcell, Doctor Arne, Greene, Mendelssohn, to make music a part of the bond between us. We will form a Choir in some quiet church near the Corner."

He touched the true chord of community when Joey Ladle used the word "they." Joey asked, when Mr. Wilding unfolded his plan:

"Is all to live in the house, Young Master Wilding? The two other
cellarmen, the three porters, the two 'prentices, and the odd men?"

"Yes. I hope we shall all be a united family, Joey."

"Ah!" said Joey. "I hope they may be."

"They? Rather say _we_, Joey."

Not many employers have reached the ideals of Dickens yet.