In Sketches by Boz, Charles Dickens seems to focus on the underground of London life. But despite the fact that his focus is on those who live an alternative lifestyle (i.e., those who turn to alcohol, drugs, and prostitution for their entertainment or escape), he also seems to glorify the upper class and almost exploits the poor destitute lower class at the expense of widening the gap between the two castes.
Charles Booth focuses only on the poor and middle class, dividing them into eight sections. The very poor are the most lazy, shiftless, worthless, degenerate people who are not of high intelligence and are not important enough to be counted to exact numbers of the population. The middle class have to work to get by but have significantly more leisure time than the lower class. Depending on the stratification, they also may not be intelligent. I find it interesting that Booth considers lower class citizens to represent those who are more primitive automatically. It's as if none of the writers of this time take into consideration the fact that there is a significant lack of opportunity for educational opportunities for the lower class.
Henry Mayhew gives his audience a first-person perspective through a primary text of what life as a nomadic member of the lower class was like. He has internalized the dichotomy between what London is romanticized as and what the city is truly like, particularly at night. It's almost as if Mayhew is one of the characters straight out of Dickens' Sketches by Boz. However, Mayhew also gives us a slightly glorified version of life as a street rat. He tells us he has never been sick in seven years, which is entirely possible but highly unlikely in the lower eschelon of society where contagious diseases, both sexual and non-sexual, ran rampant through human bodies.
Annie Besant is not a member of the lower class, and her expose on "white slavery" (young women and children working in factories nearby) would likely not resonate as soundly with the upper class. She writes from a third-person perspective and explicates how depressing and dangerous conditions in one particular matchstick factory are, but she herself has never experienced it. How are we as readers supposed to connect with authors who have little to no knowledge other than answers to interview questions about what life is like for the lower and middle classes struggling to make ends meet during the Industrial Revolution? I wonder what other causes Besant tried to rally support for (having read in her brief biography that she left the church to become a social activist).
Besant did not experience life as a factory worker, but we have to give women like her and Christina Rossetti credit for forcing their way into these terrible social systems (CR with women in prison) and at least attempting to publicize what they observed there. Remember last week's reading - even the activists still largely relied upon poets to capture the plight of the masses, perhaps because middle-class culture (much like in our own time) is largely unprepared to handle the "truth."
ReplyDeleteYou also wrote:
"It's as if none of the writers of this time take into consideration the fact that there is a significant lack of opportunity for educational opportunities for the lower class." I would speculate that, given the ideas about evolution, these writers would argue that the lower classes were biologically underdeveloped and therefore incapable of handling any learning environment.
By the way, this idea kind of ties into what Weber would later write in the Protestant Ethic - those who struggle must struggle because they committed some evil, while those who thrive do so because God favors them. Weber argues that this is the basis of middle-class and capitalist societies, and I think we see the gleanings of it in the labor writings and readings we completed the past two weeks!