“The Age of Veneer”: Charles Dickens and the antinomies of Victorian consumer culture

The bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012 was celebrated in myriad ways across the English-speaking world and beyond. Building on the long-standing tradition of heritage appropriations of his work, the “Dickens industry” made full use of the commercial opportunities: in Britain, a major new biography was serialised on Radio 4, while reworkings of Dickens’s novels were an almost omnipresent feature on television (John 240–89). A dominant motif of this outpouring was Dickens’s “humanitarianism,” especially his sympathy for the poor and his injunctions to the rich on the duty of Christian charity. Surprisingly, given the ongoing economic crisis, Dickens’s attitude towards material greed went largely unremarked despite the fact that Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel published in 1865, unreservedly damned the rich for their conspicuous consumption practices. His critique of the Veneerings and their circle and, by extension, the trajectory of British society in the “age of capital,” is all the more remarkable when we remember that Dickens was far from being a radical himself; he had embraced free trade in the mid 1840s and although he had conflicting feelings about capitalist modernity, Dickens had little time for attempts by either working-class Chartists or paternalistic Tories to regulate industrial “progress” (Slater).

Precisely such contradictions make Dickens so interesting. Although he experienced the commodity culture on display at the Great Exhibition as a kind of drowning,¹ Dickens also revelled in the excesses of Victorian consumerism. Dressed “in high satin stock and double breast pin, in glossy frock coat and velvet collar, in cut velvet waistcoat and glittering chain,” as a young man he presented himself as a dandy on the streets of London. On his first visit to America in 1842 one newspaper complained that Dickens’s “whole appearance is foppish [...] and partakes of the flash order” (Ackroyd 349). Like many bourgeois paterfamilias, he did not have to be cajoled into accompanying his wife Catherine on shopping trips and derived real pleasure from beautifying domestic space. Dickens redecorated Tavistock House in lavish fashion after moving there towards the end of 1851, provoking George Eliot’s caustic question: “How can we sufficiently pity the needy unless we know fully the blessings of plenty?” (Ackroyd 648). George Orwell once noted in a perceptive essay how Dickens’s work was vitally concerned with understanding “a city of consumers,” and that he observed the social world primarily “from the consumer-angle [...] the kind of things he notices are inn-signs, brass door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of shops and private houses, clothes, faces and, above all, food” (115, 118). Moreover, Dickens’s writing was itself imbricated within a growing consumer culture. Many firms, including producers of branded goods such as Colman’s mustard and Pears’ soap, advertised in the inserts bound in with the serial parts of his novels. After he died tea dealers and others promoted their goods by giving away free copies of his works.² Dickens understood the new consumerism from the inside.

According to Dickens’s late work, modern consumerism depended on harnessing acquisitiveness more effectively than ever before. Again, he had no doubts about the benefits that had resulted from the spread of material things made possible by free trade capitalism; his own dislocated childhood experiences made it easier for him to see though puritan yearnings for the simple life. However, in his last decade especially, Dickens foregrounded the moral bankruptcy of a culture that revolved around the acquisition of goods. The financial scandals that rocked Victorian society in the 1860s shaped his increasingly bleak vision and scholarship has shed much light on this historical context. Fears of impending financial crisis were rife when Our Mutual Friend was being serialized and in 1866 Overend, Gurney & Co., a major wholesale discount bank, collapsed and brought down over 200 companies with it. Vicious attacks on the principle of limited liability and stock market speculation were commonly made by middle-class journalists and novelists.³ However, it would be misleading to make too much of this; the weak response of the...