Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Brown
REALISM, EXPLOITATION AND THE RISING MIDDLE CLASS
Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is typical of the author’s social consciousness and biting, satirical style. The novel criticizes the exploitative amorality of 19th-century Industrial Age England, which was transformed, economically and socially, by the rising middle class. The country’s middle class espoused economic equality and opportunity, but in many cases simply parroted the behavior of the nobility, to which most aspired. The realism of other artists, such as the English painter Ford Madox Brown, portrayed the day-to-day realities of life for the working underclasses.
Keywords: Hard Times, Charles Dickens, Industrial Age, middle class, Ford Madox Brown.
The Social Consciousness of Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Brown
Though not in the strictest sense a propagandist, Charles Dickens leveraged his massive talent and hard-bitten social consciousness against the inequities of England’s class system. Few, if any, of his novels stood out as sharply against the inhumanity and hypocrisy of the great factories of the Victorian era as Hard Times (Dickens himself having been forced to work as a boot black in his impressionable youth). The period in which Dickens wrote saw a rapid widening of the gulf between the poor and middle classes, between the working masses who fed England’s great industrial machine and the rising wealth of the upwardly mobile commercial middle class. It was the new consciousness of this aggressive social movement that altered England’s “old order.”
Empowered (or perhaps emboldened) by the Reform Act of 1832, the middleclass that existed below the nobility espoused ideals of self-reliance, individuality and modern progress, emphasizing the notion that success in the new England could be based on merit, rather than on rank and social station. This dynamic socio-economic evolution and the technological advancements of the Industrial Age led England to a new, technology-based economic power. However, the success of the middle class, many of whose members came to surpass the aristocracy in terms of wealth and status, did not translate into social reforms for the underclasses. The character of Gradgrind in Hard Times is Dickens’ representation of the utilitarian school of thought, a philosophy which Dickens felt gave industrialists too much leeway at the expense of the worker. Dickens portrays the middle class social “progressives” as hypocrites, whose moral standing is of little worth compared to the simple faith of the schoolchildren, and of characters like Sissy Jupe.
The realist school of painting produced a number of great works that spoke to the kind of industrial exploitation of which Dickens wrote. In England, the painter Ford Madox Brown produced powerful visual representations that depicted the human fallout of the Industrial Revolution. His The Last of England, completed in 1859, portrayed emigrants forced to leave their homeland in search of economic and social opportunity that has been denied them in England. The inspiration for this powerful work was the emigration of English sculptor Thomas Woolner, who himself had left England for Australia. The painting includes a number of realist elements, including the presence of personal items hanging from the side of the boat.
Six years after The Last of England, Brown unveiled his most important painting, entitled Work. If any of Brown’s paintings can be said to parallel Dickens’ literary social criticism, it is this work, generally considered to be his most impactful. As a realist, Brown is considered significant for, and is most closely identified wit,h this work. It depicts not only the gritty realism of the world which 19th-century laborers inhabited, but the separation between the underclasses and the world of the idle, leisurely wealthy. These are themes which the author of Hard Times popularized more than any other novelist in the English-speaking world, in so doing creating something quite new: an artistic aesthetic informed by social awareness. Indeed, one can easily imagine the figures in Work in the guises of Dickens’ hapless and exploited urchins. For Ford Madox Brown, as with Dickens, realism was more than an artistic ethic: it was a true representation of the grim social and economic facts that made up their world.
References
Dickens, C. (1854). Hard Times. London: Bradbury and Evans.
Bendiner, K. (1998). The Art of Ford Madox Brown. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania
State University Press.
