Charles Dickens makes The Nowcast Blog!
A book review explaining why Dickens thinks economists are better than lawyers
Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Orginal publication date, 1854.
Charles Dickens was a 19th century entertainment phenomenon who used his platform---serialized novels---to do a lot of things. One of them was to satirize the institutions and professions of Victorian England. Among his most famous takedowns was the picture of the heartlessness and inefficiency of the English legal system in Bleak House. It’s one of the great examples of the power of a writer to satirize and criticize an entire profession.
Economists may not be aware Dickens didn’t spare us. The novel that satirizes economics and economists (in the form of 19th century Manchester liberals) is called Hard Times. It’s not as well known as Bleak House or those favorites of the high school reading list, David Copperfield and Tale of Two Cities. It features a severe takedown of utilitarianism and the worst part of the liberal impulse: imagining equality where it does not exist. The stand in character for economists of the time might just make us squirm a little bit.
Hard Times is set in a fictional version of Manchester. “Coketown” is a city of factories and smoke, workers (“hands”) and factory owners. Dickens makes clear that it’s not a very attractive town. But, most important:
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion build a chapel there…they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it….The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. (Chapter V)
The idea---which Dickens (or, more precisely, his characters) carry to absurd ends, is that the best way to mange business, personal relationships, and indeed everything, is to be as perfectly rational as possible. Sound like anybody we economists know?
The characters are classic Dickens figures: a blustering “self-made” man who owns mills and factories, a circus performer who is barely understandable, and, of course, a suffering figure with little power but a great heart. Dickens did like to have a character paralleling Jesus, and Stephen Blackpool, a power-loom weaver, fills that role here
Most relevant for economists, there is a central character who represents the entire intellectual approach of Manchester---the great liberal and rational response to the world that birthed and supported the growth of economics as a method of thought. Thomas Gradgrind is described as
A man of realities. A man of acts and calculations….With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. (Chapter II)
We are introduced at the beginning of the novel to Mr. Gradgrind’s school[i] in which children are referred to by number (so much more rational than names). In the first scene in the novel, Mr. Gradgrind asks the pupils to define “horse”. A girl who has grown up with horses, and whose father cares for horses at the circus, cannot simplify the concept to be rational, logical, and precise. Because horses (and even, more, people) cannot be easily reduced and defined that way. It’s no accident that the pupil who does define “horse” in the first scene becomes one of the villains of the story.
When the story turns to describing the workers in Coketown’s mills, Dickens turns up the sarcasm.
…among the multitude of Coketown, generically called “the Hands,” --- a race who would have found more favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs…” (Chapter X)
Dickens tells us that he is not going to let anybody get away with reducing people to numbers, or to statistical facts, or to their production potential.
Nor is Dickens going to accept the theory that everybody in this corner of society is truly equal, as proponents of the market like Thomas Gradgrind would claim. The mill owner frames himself as a classic “self-made” man, so, when his employee comes to seek help, he fails to understand that—despite greeting his employee as an equal—they do not in fact face the same “decision set” (to use a technical term from modern economics). A power-loom weaver, unlike a mill owner, can’t afford the huge expense of divorce in mid-19th century England.[ii] This fact disturbs neither the Mill owner nor Thomas Gradgrind; they see equality when there is none. (One is reminded, of course, of the point famously made by Anatole France in a later novel: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread”.[iii] ) Notice that Dickens manages to take up two causes in one novel: both the plight of Manchester factory workers and England’s unfair divorce laws!
Nor does the labor movement offer a way out. In fact, it is a strike that sets the tragic part of the plot in motion. Stephen Blackpool can’t afford to strike because of the wayward wife he can’t divorce, and, in the name of workers solidarity, is driven out of Coketown. The sordid picture of the labor organizer and the social pressure of the strike meeting are not very flattering to the labor movement. Not for Dickens, “Solidarity Forever.” Instead (being Dickens), he sees the solution in people---individuals---learning to become more humanistic and ethical.[iv]
But there is at least one thing positive for us economists. Dickens looks for redemption in his characters. But not all find it. The lawyers in Bleak House who have spent decades eating up an estate in litigation, are presented, in the end, in a chilling fashion. We find out the end of the case by watching the various judges, lawyers, and clerks laughing about how all the legal work has gone for naught except to employ themselves. It’s a joke (and a profitable one for them). But they remain ignorant of the terrible damage they have done to others. There is no redemption for lawyers! Dickens allows Mr. Gradgrind, in contrast, to see the error of his ways, and to become a better person: more humane, and less invested in reason and calculation above all else. We economists can be comforted that Dickens thought we—unlike lawyers—might actually be capable of becoming better human beings.
[i] Taught by one M’choakumchild. Dickens wasn’t always subtle.
[ii] At the time the book was written, a divorce required an act of Parliament. Only very well-connect or wealthy people could manage to get such a thing passed, of course.
[iii] Anatole France, The Red Lily, 1894.
[iv] Whether this is correct, or even practical, is beside the point.