To be Sung at all Conservative Dinners

We recently drew attention to a previously un-noted piece of Dickens's journalism (Long and Schlicke). It comprised his report for the Morning Chronicle on the City of London Conservative Association's first Anniversary Dinner, held at Covent Garden Theatre on the evening of 13 April 1836. Such Associations became prominent following Robert Peel's fall from power in April 1835, and were intended to rally the Conservative/Tory¹ faithful in a post-Reform Britain. Prominent in their activities were "Dinners" at which speeches denigrated the Whigs, Radicals and Irish Separatists, and celebrated the Monarchy, the Constitution and the Established Church.

Some 1200 attended the dinner in 1836, and Dickens provided a lengthy, humorously mocking account of the affair for his firmly Whig-based newspaper.²

Peel's Conservatives regained power in the general election of June–July 1841, after ten almost uninterrupted years of Whig rule. Dickens, although no longer a newspaper reporter, nevertheless felt the need to express his views in the press, albeit pseudonymously. He wrote three anti-Tory squibs signed "W" for the Examiner, a liberal weekly,³ and remarked to his friend, its literary editor John Forster, "By Jove how radical I am getting! I wax stronger and stronger in the true principles every day" (Letters 2: 357).

For the first of the Examiner pieces, Dickens revised an old song, "The Fine Old English Gentleman," which, in its original form, merrily lauded "the good old days."⁴ Its cosily traditionalist content made it a favorite performance item at Conservative socio-political gatherings.⁵ Dickens's version subverted its sentiment: the second and the last of its eight verses provide a flavor:

The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and chains, With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains, With rebel heads, and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins; For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains

Of the fine old English Tory times;Soon may they come again!

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, In England there shall be dear bread—in Ireland, sword and brand; And poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand,

Of the fine old English Tory days;Hail to the coming time!^[6]

And, no doubt remembering his long night among the City of London Conservatives five years earlier, Dickens appended to the title " To be said or sung at all Conservative Dinners."