Across his writing, Charles Dickens repeatedly depicts London’s lower classes as plagued by extreme cold and hunger. He often employs these sensations in “likeable” characters—those to whom the reader has grown attached on account of their suffering, romantic involvement or otherwise agreeable conditions—in order to elicit sympathy for the poor, thereby creating a basis of support for his critique of aristocratic incompetence and indifference to their struggles. Cold and hunger are both particularly effective in the induction of this sympathy because of their accessibility: Dickens understands his audience to be far too large for a reliable knowledge of any lesser-known ailments—hence, applying such to a character would inevitably fall short in engendering certain readers’ sympathy for them—but both cold and hunger present themselves as frequent occurrences to readers of every class. These readers’ familiarity with the physical implications of these two occurrences allows them to imagine their extremes, thus positioning the characters suffering from said extremes to win the reader’s sympathy.
In Bleak House, Dickens incurs much of this sympathy in Jo, an orphaned street-sweeper living in the slums of Tom-All-Alone’s. Jo is first introduced as “the boy that sweeps the crossing down the lane,” establishing him to still be a child, and as such, an especially vulnerable character (Dickens 188). Dickens then offers a more comprehensive assessment of Jo’s condition when a beadle brings him before the court, writing that he has “no father, no mother, no friends,” has “never been to school” and is obligated to tell the truth in his testimony because he fears punishment (Dickens 188-189). By detailing the absence of Jo’s parents, and subsequent absence of any sort of education, Dickens places the blame for Jo’s struggles not on himself, but on the circumstances he was born into—a deliberate assignment that immediately portrays Jo as the victim of an ineffective society, and therefore deserving of the reader’s sympathy. This sympathy then grows as the reader hears of Jo’s present fear before the court, as he has done no wrong, yet believes himself to be at risk of “[v]ery bad” punishment should he not comply (Dickens 189). Compliance, in this case, cannot be reasonably expected of Jo because he is illiterate. The impossibility of his task makes his situation even more difficult for the reader to reckon with, and subsequently even more sympathy-inducing.
Dickens continues his establishment of Jo as a “victim” character in the following pages, building a mounting sympathy in his audience for Jo’s conditions. He reveals that “Jo lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place known… [as] Tom-All-Alone’s,” where rain drips through broken ceilings at night and “vermin parasites” fetch and carry fever between “ruined human wretch” (Dickens 280). Through this vivid description of Jo’s living conditions, Dickens prompts his reader to imagine the bodily sensations of existence in such conditions: open, exposed houses full of feverous parasites implies a lack of both warmth and food. Moreover, by suggesting that Jo’s actual survival is constantly being jeopardized—he has not “yet” died, but he very well may—Dickens primes his reader to consider how their emotional attachment to Jo is threatened by these physical conditions.
However, such consideration cannot yet be expected of his entire audience—this is the aforementioned obstacle of accessibility. Dickens’ upper-class readers, generally, have never experienced these vermin parasites, or any comparable bodily sensations, and thus cannot fully conceptualize the state in which Jo lives. Even the middle class cannot be relied on to truly understand these descriptions. Dickens circumvents this incomprehension by writing of Jo becoming ill, then describing the bodily effects of this illness through the easily-understandable sensations of cold and hunger. To the former, Jo says that he is “froze… and then burnt up, and then froze, and then burnt up, ever so many times in a hour” (Dickens 552)—a far more digestible depiction than the vermin parasites of Tom-All-Alones, though both conditions are implied to be brought on from his residence there. Of Jo’s illness-driven hunger, Dickens describes first the anxious manner in which he “begins to gulp the coffee and to gnaw the bread” that Mr. Woodcourt buys him, glancing around “like a scared animal” all the while (Dickens 816). By comparing Jo’s demeanor while eating to that of a “scared animal,” Dickens implies that starvation is so natural and fundamental to his character that he has developed an according body language. He then continues in his illustrations of Jo’s hunger:
But he is so sick and miserable that even hunger has abandoned him. “I thought I was amost a-starvin, sir,” says Jo, soon putting down his food, “but I don’t know nothink—not even that. I don’t care for eating wittles nor yet for drinking on ’em.” And Jo stands shivering and looking at the breakfast wonderingly (Dickens 816).
By attributing Jo’s sudden loss of appetite not to his actual nourishment, but rather to his “know[ing] nothink,” Dickens suggests that Jo, in his own view, is not worthy of being healed by Woodcourt’s generosity; hunger again appears as natural to him as it is to a wild animal, furthering the sympathy that the reader feels for his condition.
In direct contrast to this hunger, Dickens frequently illustrates the wealthy, upper-class characters of Bleak House as gluttonous, especially in the face of poor ones like Jo. He introduces the greedy minister Mr. Chadband, for example, as a “large yellow man, with a fat smile” (Dickens 334), then mentioning that despite his claim to have “partaken, in moderation,” in their dinner, this was “certainly not the case” for him—all of which happens directly in front of Jo, also present at the table (Dickens 344). By portraying Chadband as “large,” in both stature and appetite, and then placing him in immediate proximity of Jo, Dickens creates a physical juxtaposition of their respective conditions and circumstances: Chadband is a fat, rich and gluttonous man with a wife, while Jo is a small, starving boy with no one. This juxtaposition suggests the two to be opposite characters, winning Jo sympathy as a product of readers’ distaste for Chadband and his greed-driven lack of hunger.
Dickens’ characterization of Jo as a “victim” of aristocratic negligence, rather than a conscious offender to the system, also relies on Jo’s own actions and behaviors. To evoke sympathy from the reader, he indeed must struggle under the impossibly heavy weight of London’s upper classes; he must not appear apathetic or passive in this struggle, however, lest the reader see him as undeserving of their sympathy. Maura Spiegel points to “the proper or moderate balance” between vehemence and placidity as a necessary component of incurring this sympathy in her article “Managing Pain: Suffering and Reader Sympathy in Bleak House” (2). An excess of either demeanor, she argues, may present a character as either incapable of emotion or overly expressive to the fault of their sincerity; whereas Dickens, Spiegel continues, uses “an effortful but not distorting self-management [to] increase… our sympathy” of characters (Spiegel 2-3). This trait of self-management becomes immediately apparent in Jo via his devout, often unrewarded work, “fight[ing] it out at his crossing… and get[ting] but a scanty sum to pay for the unsavoury shelter of Tom-all-Alone’s” (Dickens 283). By narratively describing Jo as “fight[ing] it out,” but not letting Jo describe this “fight” himself, Dickens adheres to Spiegel’s point of the “proper or moderate balance” of displayed emotion: Jo is clearly emotionally incentivized to continue his work, but not so much so that he will tell the reader directly.
This balance becomes especially evident in Jo’s eventual death. While many of Bleak House’s characters die grandiose, emotionally evocative deaths (Krook’s spontaneous combustion, Lady Dedlock’s freezing to death near Captain Hawdon’s grave), Jo accepts his own readily. In place of any attempt to survive, he simply asks Woodcourt to bury him alongside a man who had been good to him—acknowledging that should he himself show up to the cemetery, he would likely be turned away, but Woodcourt is presentable and wealthy enough to be let in. Dickens then gives Jo a brief, unceremonious back-and-forth with Woodcourt before striking him dead:
“Art in heaven–is the light a-comin, sir?”
“It is close at hand. Hallowed by thy name!”
“Hallowed be—thy—”
The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day (Dickens 831).
Jo doesn’t get to finish his prayer. He doesn’t get to arrange his burial. He dies and is immediately likened to the other lower-class citizens “dying thus around us every day.” The abruptness of his death, and of his being forgotten, shakes the reader. Jo’s own willingness to die, still following Spiegel’s theory, makes him even more pitiable, and thus even more deserving of our sympathy; his death then becomes all the more tragic.
Dickens evokes this tragedy, then takes what initially appears to be a complete departure: Jo dies at the end of chapter 47, yet chapter 48 begins with an account of the happenings at the Dedlock estates. By linking these two events, however, Dickens highlights the harsh juxtaposition between them. He brings the reader’s attention from the physical illness that actually killed Jo to the underlying circumstances that made him ill in the first place, as these are the same circumstances that presently make the Dedlocks’ “fashionable world” work “in full swing” (Dickens 834). In doing so, Dickens harnesses the sympathy that he has evoked in his reader—a sympathy no longer isolated to Jo, as Dickens was careful to connect the boy’s death to those who die in London’s slums every day—and weaponizes it against the real-world equivalents of the Dedlocks.
These real-world implications may very well be easier for a reader to understand when set against an equally real-world backdrop. While Dickens crafted Jo’s life and death as a fiction-based critique of London’s class system, much of his other work revolved around the documentation of real poverty-induced deaths in the city—a genre shift which spares the reader the effort of connecting fictional characters to their real-world counterparts, and allows Dickens’ depictions of cold and hunger to be taken completely literally. Joseph W. Childers, for one, argues in his chapter “Politicized Dickens: The Journalism of the 1850s” that Dickens’ journalism “had as great—and even more immediate—impact on the issues of his day than his novels,” as he was freed from the bounds of critical reception and “was able to exercise the sort of latitude… that might be too easily read as sermons or screeds in his fiction” (201). Childers’ assertion that the audiences of Dickens’ fiction were both more critical and less attentive to extended, sermon-esque accounts of characters makes way for an examination of his journalistic works, written without these constraints.
Amongst the most prevalent of these journals was Household Words, which, while including fictional stories throughout, also contained a section titled “Narrative of Law and Crime.” Dickens used this section to present short, single-paragraph accounts of criminal trials, citizens’ deaths and adjacent legal happenings, though still taking an opinionated and condemnatory tone. In its January, 1854 installment, Dickens writes of a “case of appalling destitution” (Dickens HW 3). He first introduces us to the “emaciated body of a poor woman, who appeared to have died of cold and starvation,” then reveals that she had been found dead by her “almost broken-hearted” husband, who awoke to her “cold and motionless” body next to him (Dickens HW 3). The progressive order in which he reveals these details is absolutely intentional: this woman’s death would be sad enough as an isolated incident, but after capturing this sadness, Dickens makes the reader consider the grief of her husband, and then gives a graphic explanation of exactly what the husband experienced to cause this grief. The husband, whom Dickens repeatedly refers to as the “poor man,” even after revealing his name, becomes a likeable character because he is the victim of this cycle. It has worn him down from the “industrious, civil and well-conducted” man that he once was, and forced him into unemployment because he “did not wish to be separated from his wife” as she died (Dickens HW 3)—demonstrating another admirable trait and therefore winning him further sympathy from the audience.
Dickens also employs an element of hyperbole here: the “cold and starvation” that killed this woman become villainous, as if they themselves had brought her husband to such terrible grief. By pointing the finger directly to these conditions, Dickens not only humanizes them but then likens their “human” forms to the rich, gluttonous characters that impose such conditions upon the lower classes. This contrast, just like that between Jo and Chadband, delivers the reader a pointed juxtaposition that offers sympathy to the lower classes: if the “poor man” is a victim of cold and hunger, then there must be a person, or multiple people, responsible; if the elite are living in excess while this same cold and hunger continue to kill off the poor, then they must be to blame.
He continues by paraphrasing the beadle as having “seen hundreds of cases of destitution,” but never “such a dreadful one as this before” (Dickens HW 3). Immediately, Dickens’ wording suggests that London’s destitution—and therefore, its citizens’ cold and hunger—must be worsening, as this recent case is the worst ever seen; but he also takes this opportunity to again place blame, writing that “there was neglect, he [the magistrate] was afraid, on the part of some one… he felt surprised the doctor had not recommended some nourishments for the man and his wife while they were in such a deplorable state.” The magistrate’s accusatory tone here exemplifies Dickens’ tendency to, as Childers writes, “narrate… from the perspective of himself as a character in his own story, to speak his mind” (Childers 202). By inserting his own authorial voice into an individual, trustworthy character, Dickens is then able to critique large concepts by personifying them as opposing characters to those which embody his own voice. In the case of the magistrate and doctor, Dickens uses the former to offer a sympathetic commentary on the “poor man”—for whom, as previously established, the reader already feels a great deal of sympathy on account of his grief and destitution—writing that “it was very painful indeed [to the magistrate] to hear of such a case as this” (Dickens HW 3). By demonstrating the magistrate’s emotional reaction, which aligns with that of the readers, Dickens makes him a likeable character; by then pitting the likeable magistrate directly against the doctor, and detailing how the latter character “had not been near… [the man’s] starving wife for three weeks” (Dickens HW 3), Dickens makes the doctor unlikeable on account of his negligence.
Considering Dickens’ positioning of each character, we can imagine the doctor to “embody a position, an idea, even a way of being in the world” (Childers 202); he is representative of the aristocratic indifference, and utter lack of sympathy, for the struggles of the lower classes. In extension of this theory, I contend that Dickens creates these unlikeable characters specifically in order to offer his readers easily-understandable commentaries on where their sympathies should lie. Referring back to Bleak House, take the dynamic between the Mrs. Pardiggle, the brickmaker and his wife, Jenny: while Mrs. Pardiggle claims to visit the family out of pure philanthropy, Esther—through her narrative, which is again a vessel of Dickens’ own opinion—describes Mrs. Pardiggle’s voice as having “not a friendly sound,” but rather being “much too businesslike and systematic” (Dickens 136). After establishing Mrs. Pardiggle as representative of condescending and unhelpful philanthropy, however, Dickens takes a departure from his typical portrayals of lower-class characters. Instead of writing the brickmaker to be a “victim” character, like Jo or the “poor man” of Household Words, Dickens details his abuse of Jenny via his drawn-out reproach to Mrs. Pardiggle’s arrival at his house: “‘And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a lie!’” (Dickens 138). Through this depiction, Dickens positions the brickmaker as a representative of the midpoint between reader sympathy and contempt. He is, undeniably, a victim of the same aristocratic system that causes the reader to feel sympathy for the lower classes, yet his actions suggest that they should feel anything but sympathy.
To offer an alternative perspective on Dickens’ intentions in the brickmaker’s character, I refer back to the earlier juxtaposition between Jo and Chadband. The physical proximity between these two characters, sitting at the same table, made their respective roles in London’s class system strikingly clear. The physical proximity, now, between the brickmaker and Jenny has a similar effect: the brickmaker underscores Jenny’s powerlessness by existing as a victim himself, yet simultaneously victimizing her through his physical abuse. This abuse, just like the cold and hunger that Jo experienced, is an exaggerated form of a familiar pain. Any reader can imagine the physical sensation of being hit, and thus can sympathize with Jenny’s condition.
Dickens builds upon this sympathy with the detail of Jenny’s baby. First described as “a poor little gasping baby by the fire” that she nurses, the brickmaker then reveals it to be dead—one of “five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants” (Dickens 137). Here again we see a juxtaposition, now between Jenny and Mrs. Pardiggle. Both women have had five children, yet Mrs. Pardiggle—despite her wealth—ignores hers to the point that they are “weazened and shrivelled… absolutely ferocious with discontent” (Dickens 130), while Jenny appears devastatingly attentive to her own children, even in their death. Both women have husbands, but Mrs. Pardiggle’s remains largely self-occupied, funding her philanthropy and allowing her to do as she pleases, while Jenny’s drinks constantly and beats her. Even in the names of each character, we see a discrepancy: Mrs. Pardiggle has taken her husband’s name, and is referred to by “Mrs.,” while Jenny is never awarded this status. The contrast between both women’s circumstances, and their subsequent actions, frames Jenny as another character deserving of the reader’s sympathy; even more so as her opposite, Mrs. Pardiggle, becomes increasingly unlikeable for her negligent parenting.
A similar pattern can be seen in Liz, another woman living in the slums of London, also married to a brickmaker. Liz’s husband, just as Jenny’s, is never named—both men are simply referred to as “the brickmaker.” By removing their individuality, yet awarding such to their wives, Dickens prevents the reader from becoming attached to their characters or feeling any sympathy for their positions; instead, they become identical representations of the larger archetype of impoverished men in London: cold and hungry, drunk and abusive, living in constant filth. As Liz reckons with her own condition, subject to the constant abuse of her husband, she consoles Jenny by telling her, “Much better to think of [Jenny’s baby] dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!” (Dickens 400). Such a grim line will inevitably be received by the reader with some level of apprehension; any mother, especially in the eyes of Dickens’ 19th-century audience, is assumed to bear the brunt of the responsibility for her child’s wellbeing. To explicitly wish death upon them is an entirely uncomfortable reversal of this dynamic. Dickens, forecasting this apprehension, makes true the earlier contention of Childers by inserting his own response into the dialogue of detective Mr. Bucket: “‘Why, you an’t such an unnatural woman, I hope,’ returns Mr. Bucket sternly, ‘as to wish your own child dead?’” (Dickens 400). While Mr. Bucket outwardly appears to pose a genuine question here, it can be critically read as a rhetorical move by Dickens, providing Liz the opportunity to address the reader directly. In this address, she both justifies her statement and professes the absolute disrepair of her life under the brickmaker, explaining that her child will “be beat, and see me beat” by her husband, and be “made to fear his home, and perhaps to stray wild” (Dickens 401). Where Liz would otherwise have been perceived as an “unnatural woman,” the reader instead now understands her to be so affected by the poverty of London’s aristocracy that she can hardly bear the thought of having a child. Taking into account Jenny’s devout motherhood, and the similarity between her and Liz as “us two mothers” (Dickens 401), the reader is inclined to see Liz’s wish for her own child to die as a result of her having been “with Jenny when she lost hers… and… know[ing] how she grieved” (Dickens 400). As such, the physical abuse that Liz endures takes on an additional mental aspect in the mind of the reader, evoking another level of sympathy for both Liz, in her ruined motherhood, and her baby, in the future that it faces.
Dickens compounds this sympathy through the physical presence of Jo, who arrives at Liz’s house not even a page later, seeing Mr. Bucket and instantly “trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not having moved on far enough” (Dickens 401-402). Through this arrival, he becomes a tangible validation of Liz’s fears; his presence gives us a familiar example of what could become of her child, should it live. His terror at the mere sight of Mr. Bucket then incurs a sympathy for him, as he again expects persecution for having done no wrong, and therefore a sympathy for Liz’s child via their similarities.
By connecting Jo, Liz and her child, Dickens reminds the reader that the sympathy they feel for one lower-class character is the same sympathy they feel for another. He grounds their experience in understandable, recurring illustrations of poverty-driven struggle amongst London’s poor, and uses the resultant sympathy to place the blame upon the concept—personified through his own characters—of the consciously, willfully selfish aristocracy.
Works Cited:
Childers, J.W. (2006). Politicized Dickens: The Journalism of the 1850s. In: Bowen, J., Patten, R.I. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524200_10
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Wordsworth Editions, 1993.
“Narrative of Law and Crime.” Household Narrative of Current Events (for the Year 1854), vol. V, January 1854, pp. 2-5. Dickens Journals Online, https://www.djo.org.uk/household-narrative-of-current-events/year-1854/page-2.html.
Spiegel, Maura. “Managing Pain: Suffering and Reader Sympathy in ‘Bleak House.’” Dickens Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 1995, pp. 3–10. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45291527.