I recently had the somewhat dubious privilege of sitting in one of the private bars frequented by the KCs and other silks (no longer QCs, thanks to the Acts Interpretation Act 1901), while waiting for a packet of documents to be delivered to me (after being sent there to wait); so that I could take it back to our offices.
Having been on the inside of the courts system, I am well aware of the fact that the powdered wig, silk and velvet gown class, look upon the rest of us as scum. I was also aware that as I sat in the bar in my black Crombie Coat and Cheescutter, that I am clad in the armor of the working class north of Blighty as a sort of polite defence against what His Majesty's most well read can throw at me.
While sat sitting, I was reading my copy of "Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes, when I was asked by an elderly gentleman, who looked like he could have come out of the century before last (the Col. Mustard/Maj. Bloodnok type of mustachioed person), what I thought of the book that I was reading and if I agreed with the general sentiment that order was not a natural tendency of the human condition. We had a neat little discussion about the nature of the monopoly of violence which is wielded by the state and I think that I might have impressed him, due to the fact that an apparent ruffian and barbarian like myself can match swords whilst not being in possession of any letters of note after my name.
This invariably led to me asking about the book which he was carrying; which I recognised as the same imprint of Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" which I had read in high school. I explained that of all of Dickens' work, I found this uncharacteristically tedious but that the discussion in the appendix about the 1834 Poor Law was fascinating. He was surprised when lo and behold, this appendix was exactly as I had described.
Long ago in the mists of time, when Godzilla still roamed the holy mountain and during the recession that Australia had to have, I was but a lad of 12 years old. Back then, the Soviet Union had not yet collapsed and the teachers at my high school thought it interesting to call a 10-minute non-period during the school day "Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading" or USSR; which was likely a way of giving teachers 10 minutes of quiet after lunch before they would once again have to face a pack of hellbeasts.
These periods were different from the usual in Year 7, as they decided to split us all up instead of sending us around as a 30 member hoard from one class to the next. By my calculations now, dropping kids into classes of 20 which were different from the usual, meant that there was exactly 0.6 kids from every roll call class. This was ten minutes of respite for me, who spent most of the day wishing komm süßer tod and dreaming of ivy covered walls and smoky French cafes once my allotted six-year sentence was over.
I remember my copy of Oliver Twist well. I got the general impression that the reading lists that high school teachers assign are because they think that we will either enjoy them or aught to have read as part of the functioning cultural commonwealth but that what is actually happening is that they're inflicting on us the same kinds of pain inflicted upon them when they were in high school.
It should be said that Charles Dickens would have been very well versed in the poverty of early-Victorian, Industrial London. His own father had been sent to a debtors’ prison; so he experienced first hand what it would have been like to be a highly impoverished citizen with no say in his own fate; presumably he would have only gained the franchise with the Reform Act of 1830.
I get the impression that with novels like 'Oliver Twist', 'Bleak House', and even 'A Tale Of Two Cities' that the hardships that he faced as a child would have stayed in the back of his mind as an adult, while he churned out novels and other works of journalism.
Oliver Twist was begun after the passage of Poor Law of 1834, which made life worse for a great many people by halting government payments to the maintenance of able-bodied poor people unless they entered workhouses. Oliver Twist despite its reasonably happy ending (for the idiots who like that sort of thing), is more a piece of social satire which is like a flintlock aimed directly at the problem of poverty in London in the 1830s.
Probably because it depicts open crimes and murder without trying to sugar-coat it or wrap it in florid excuse, which in the 1830s was quite scandalous, it rapidly sold a heap of copies. I think that it is properly what is known as a "Newgate Novel", which is named after Newgate Prison. Presumably the character of Fagin was based on a genuine pickpocket named Ikey Solomon, however Dickens never openly made the connection. Actually, Fagin seems quite pleasant next to all the ruffians, barbarians and ne-er-do-wells of the rest of the novel.
But as far as I was concerned in 1991, the whole front of the book was but a shadow of the appendix at the back. My personal copy (number 35/120) had not been broken in by the student before me but after I was done with it, had gained a weird crack at the back.
The appendices contained notes and background to the novel; which included a possibly 20,000 word essay on the amendments to the Poor Laws in 1834. I thought that they were more interesting than the novel itself.
The broad summary of those 1834 amendment are that different classes of paupers should be segregated and that the local parishes should specialise and swap paupers. This even included the separation of husbands and wives, so that "proper regulation of workhouses" would "serve the whole of the union".
In reality, poorhouses became de facto prisons whose actual purpose was to securely confine large numbers of the lower classes at low cost. Mothers of illegitimate children received less support and there wasn't really any attempt to identify the fathers of illegitimate children. This in turn meant that there were far more children who belonged to nobody and of whom no-one would mind if they were ill-treated and went missing or died. Plus, they became practically free labour; which was useful given the Slave Trade Act 1804 and the Abolition Of Slavery Act 1830.
What I find disturbing is that the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws 1832 was led by Edwin Chadwick, who being a Benthamite, wanted to enact changes to the 1832 on the principle of utilitarianism; which were mostly Poor Law Amendment Act 1834.
What also may be of note is that Malthus' "An Essay on the Principle of Population" instilled fear in lawmakers, who read that because population growth was geometric and that without due measures, the population would increase faster than the ability of a nation to feed it, that England was in trouble.
Thus, the existence of poverty, which was also theologically explained as the result of just punishment that God might inflict on someone, rendered any and all assistance to the poor under the 1832 laws as self-defeating. Any and all assistance to poor people should be removed; which would hopefully lead to a decrease in the number of poor people as they all died out.
I do not want to speculate why this mustachioed person (probably KC) was reading Oliver Twist, however I can not help but wonder what a person who reads law for a living, would make of the appendix at the back (assuming that it is still included in modern imprints).
Do the powdered wig, silk and velvet gown class, look upon the rest of us as things to be improved or ignored? Do they see the great many of us as a problem which should be discouraged from breeding and existing or do they not in fact see us at all?
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