Cityread Blog

Should We Feel Guilty? reading Dickens biography by Claire Tomalin
February 22, 2012

Kilburn High Road is a grey frozen wash.  The sky spits ice that is about to become snow.  I’ve nearly reached Kilburn tube station when I see her.  A woman who uses two wooden sticks to draw herself to a half standing position.  Her back is stooped.  She is struggling to open some kind of box.  I look closer and I see it is in fact a plastic tub.  The kind you might buy ice cream in.  She pulls the lid off and holds the carton in front of her.  Only then do I realise she is starting to beg.    It is too cold to think of sitting on the pavement.  How long can she possibly hope to stand there?  Should I give her money?  Should I ask her where she’s sleeping tonight?  I do neither.  I’m in a hurry.

On the tube, I begin to read Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens A Life.  It begins with a description of Dickens helping to save a poor servant girl who is accused of murdering her new born baby.  Not only does he persuade his fellow jurors to show mercy, he has food sent to the prison where she is incarcerated.  He does this at a time when he’s extremely busy and has financial pressures of his own.  He takes a personal interest in someone that his society considers to be amongst the lowest of the low.

Dickens not only wrote about the poor.  He defended their rights and helped support them all his life.  As a young journalist, he reported on the failed attempts to amend the Poor Law.  This law saw whole families thrown out of their homes and into large institutional workhouses.  Here men and women were strictly separated, including husbands from their wives, and they were forced to wear special clothing.  In other words, they were treated like criminals guilty of the crime of being poor.  Tomalin points out that for most of the middle class MPs of the time this made perfectly good sense.

This morning on the radio I listened to a banker defending his right to a salary of over a million pounds a year.  He believes he works very long hours, that hard work and excellence should be rewarded.  He says he is not a robot and he’s hurt by criticism of what society has decided it should pay him.  Is it his fault there is still such a division between rich and poor?   How much responsibility should we take for the society we live in?  Would Dickens have considered the woman on crutches begging with her ice cream box in the snow a reproach to us all?

Comments (2)

  • Barbara Saunders

    I think we do have a responsibility towards each other. We may not be able to change society in our lifetime, but everyone can do something, in whatever way they feel most able, to help someone.
    It’s a pity that the media, who seem to themselves up as judge, jury and executioner, are biased in favour of the interests of business and the “Haves” – much as it was in Dicken’s Day.
    Perhaps it doesn’t need saying, perhaps everybody is waiting for someone to say something.

  • Barbara Saunders

    On a positive note, I’m glad I finally read Oliver Twist.

A Week in December
By Sebastian Faulks

London, the week before Christmas 2007. Over seven wintry days, we follow the lives of seven characters across the city, from a hedge fund manager to a Tube train driver. Above the complex patterns of modern urban life, the writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it . As the gripping climax looms, they are forced, one by one, to awake from their blinkered present to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.

About Aoife Mannix
Aoife Mannix was born in Sweden of Irish parents. She grew up in Dublin, Ottawa and New York before moving to London. Her first novel Heritage of Secrets was published in 2008. She is the author of four collections of poetry; The Trick of Foreign Words (2002), The Elephant in the Corner (2005), Growing Up An Alien (2007) and Turn The Clocks Upside Down (2008). She regularly features on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. She has been writer in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Poetry School, Spread the Word, All Change and Apples & Snakes. She has performed throughout the UK including at Latitude, the Big Chill, and Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has toured internationally with the British Council to China, Latvia, Nigeria, Turkey, Taiwan, Thailand, India, Norway and Austria. To find out more, please visit her website www.aoifemannix.com

About Sarah Parker
Dr Sarah Parker is an early career academic specialising in nineteenth and twentieth century literature. She is running this year’s Cityread Online Book Group.


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