IV
Of political thought, again, his world is almost as empty. He was, in his way, an early-Victorian Radical. When he saw a legal or political hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious to the Commonwealth—the Poor Laws, Debtors’ Prisons, the Court of Chancery, the Patent (or Circumlocution) Office and so forth, with the people who batten on such conventions, taking them for granted as immutable—Dickens struck hard and often effectively. But he struck at what he saw under his own eyes. Beyond this immediate indignation he had no reasoned principles of political or social reform. I have to hand, at this moment, no evidence to confirm a guess which I will nevertheless hazard, that he hated Jeremy Bentham and all his works. Certainly the professional, bullying, committee-working philanthropists—Mrs. Jellaby and Mr. Honeythunder, whose successors pullulate in this age—were the very devil to him. His simple formula ever was—in an age when Parliament carried a strong tradition of respect—“Yes, my Lords and Gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse, this broken life. Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and Gentlemen, and all through your acquiescence, your misfeasance, your neglect!” To the immediate reader his message ran simply, “Take into your heart God’s most excellent gift of Charity: by which I mean let Charity begin at home, in that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in your own daily work; let it but extend to your own neighbours who need your help; and so—and only so—will the city of God be established on earth.”