Charity and Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy

Chapter One: Help Wanting: The Exhaustion of a Dickensian Idol

37 Help Wanting The Exhaustion of a Dickensian Ideal “When you have sat at your needle in my room, you have been in fear of me, but you have supposed me to have been doing you a kindness; you are better informed now, and know me to have done you an injury.” —Dickens, Little Dorrit In July 1860, Dickens published a piece in All the Year Round containing a devastating scene of philanthropy gone wrong. The article relates Dickens’s own experiences as, during a night of insomnia, he rambles “houseless” through central London and Southwark. A bell tolling three o’clock finds him on the steps of St. Martin’s:1 Suddenly, a thing that in a moment more I should have trodden upon without seeing, rose up at my feet with a cry of loneliness and houselessness, struck out of it by the bell, the like of which I never heard. We then stood face to face looking at one another, frightened by one another. The creature was like a Chapter One Charity and Condescension 38 beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty, and it had a loose bundle of rags on, which it held together with one of its hands. It shivered from head to foot,and its teeth chattered,and as it stared at me—persecutor,devil,ghost, whatever it thought me—it made with its whining mouth as if it were snapping at me, like a worried dog. Intending to give this ugly object money, I put out my hand to stay it—for it recoiled as it whined and snapped—and laid my hand upon its shoulder. Instantly, it twisted out of its garment, like the young man in the New Testament, and left me standing alone with its rags in my hands.2 What is gained, what even is learned, in this encounter? Imagine the cold March night inTrafalgar Square,a young man in rags,harried by the elements and by his imagination, faced suddenly by—not a Brownlow or a Cheeryble but the father of all the Brownlows and Cheerybles, the very conscience of philanthropy.For decades Dickens had urged readers to reach out to lost souls like this beetle-browed youth.Yet now his own helping gesture comes to nothing .It does not matter that Charles Dickens passed by; an alderman or policeman , or an actual devil or ghost, would have done just as well. The futility of the scene seems to forfeit the social mission of the earlier Dickens, for there can be little hope for charity when the poor recoil from help as they would from harm. The benefactor too is called into question as a possible“persecutor ,” his companionship becoming theft as he inadvertently seizes the youth’s only garment.3 Philanthropy is no longer a solution to the failures of society; it has proven itself a failure as well. And yet, while this scene is a testament to that failure, it contains traces of the hope that has been abandoned: the ideal of personal charity. I use the phrase“personal charity” to denote a particular strain in Victorian discussions of philanthropy. Borrowing the logic of condescension, proponents of personal charity held that the primary (or exclusive) function of philanthropy should be to multiply the points of contact between rich and poor, a contact that had been increasingly attenuated by the stratifications of modern urban life. Rather than contribute to the economic relief that was the sole province of the state, philanthropists should personally visit hospitals, prisons, schools, workhouses, and, of course, the homes of the poor. Through individual scenes of personal contact, each class would exert a salutary influence on the other. The rich would advise the poor on matters spiritual (scripture , doctrine, prayer) and temporal (economic and domestic management, health, hygiene), while the poor would remind the rich of the necessity of Help Wanting: The Exhaustion of a Dickensian Ideal 39 Christian charity and would often provide examples of fortitude, dignity, and (paradoxically) independence. Dickens embraced the personal approach to philanthropy, particularly in what I call his middle period, from Dombey and Son (1846–48) to Bleak House (1852–53).4 During these years,Dickens moved away from the vision of general benevolence he had supported in his earlier novels and looked for solutions that would draw rich and poor into a much tighter scheme of relation. Yet Dickens’s brand of personal charity...