The prospects however were doubtful, for Mr. Fizkin had thirty-three electors locked up in the coach house of the White Hart. All the hotels were full of voters and Mrs. Perker had brought green parasols for the wives of doubtful supporters of Mr. Slumkey. Then came the day of nomination and “During the whole time of the polling, the town was in a perpetual fever of excitement. Everything was conducted on the most liberal and delightful scale. Exciseable articles were remarkably cheap at all the public houses.... A small body of electors remained unpolled until the very last day. They were calculating and reflecting persons, who had not yet been convinced by the arguments of either party, although they had had frequent conferences with each. One hour before the close of the poll Mr. Perker solicited the honour of a private interview with these intelligent, these noble, these patriotic men. It was granted. His arguments were brief, but satisfactory. They went in a body to the poll; and when they returned, the honourable Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall, was returned also.”
To persons accustomed to modern Parliamentary elections in England this passage would need a commentary to be understood. The nomination and the show of hands amid riotous disorder is a thing of the past. The protracted poll, lasting in some cases for several days, the non-resident electors billeted in the inns at the candidates’ expense, and the whole scene Dickens depicted belongs to another age which is almost incomprehensible to the England of to-day.
Sam Weller’s story of his father and the voters had more point in those days than now. Mr. Weller was offered a twenty-pound note ($100) and it was suggested that if the coach were overturned by the bank of a canal it might be a good thing. Strangely enough an accident happened. To quote Sam’s words: “You wouldn’t believe it, sir,” continued Sam, with a look of inexpressible impudence at his master, “that on the wery day he came down with those voters, his coach was upset on that ’ere wery spot, and every man of them was turned into the canal.” In the unreformed Parliament, before 1832, the boroughs had each its own peculiar electorate; and I am glad to use for my information a book written by two learned scholars now in America, Mr. and Mrs. Porritt. In not a few places the election of members was vested in the Mayor and burgesses, in others the different guilds and corporations were the electors. In one case the franchise was more democratic even than now, the very tramps who slept in the town of Preston became voters. Not infrequently the members were nominated by a local magnate. In many cases the town sold its nomination to the highest bidder; and this was occasionally the case at Eatandswill, if so be that it represents Sudbury. But frequently the electors were the so-called “freemen” of the borough. The name takes us back to mediæval times, when slavery was in existence, or to the days when the guilds were close corporations, and no one not free of them could practise any trade. But in later times the freedom was a matter of inheritance and could even be taken up, in some cases, by marriage with a “freeman’s” daughter. The franchise in many towns was enjoyed only by these freemen, and in Ipswich, to take an example familiar to me, most of them were non-resident.
In an election in the “twenties,” which is reputed to have cost the candidates £30,000 ($150,000), I have been told that they chartered ships to bring electors from Holland. This is, doubtless, why all the hotels in Eatandswill were crowded, and explains the elder Mr. Weller’s adventure by the canal. Bribery was illegal; and in a famous case in 1819 Sir Manasseh Massey Lopez was fined £10,000 ($50,000) and imprisoned for two years for practising it at Grampound. But it was an exceptional case; and the Lords threw out the bill for disfranchising the borough.
Now we are on the subject of political life I cannot resist reminding you of a perfectly delightful sketch of a political fraud in the person of Mr. Gregsbury in “Nicholas Nickleby.” He comes into the story for no particular reason except to give Dickens the joy of describing the sort of man he had doubtless observed when he was a pressman in the House of Commons.
Nicholas is present when the deputation arrives to request Mr. Gregsbury to resign his seat, and Mr. Pugstyles is its spokesman.
“‘My conduct, Pugstyles,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, looking round upon the deputation with gracious magnanimity, ‘my conduct has been, and ever will be, regulated by a sincere regard for this great and happy country. Whether I look at home, or abroad; whether I behold the peaceful industrious communities of our island home: her rivers covered with steamboats, her road with locomotives, her streets with cabs, her skies with balloons of a power and magnitude hitherto unknown in the history of aëronautics—I say whether I look at home, etc., etc., I clasp my hands, and, turning my eyes to the broad expanse above my head, exclaim, Thank God I am a Briton.’” When even this outburst does not meet with approval and the deputation presses Mr. Gregsbury to resign, the member reads a letter he has addressed to Mr. Pugstyles in which he says, “Actuated by no personal motives, but moved only by high and great constitutional considerations ... I would rather keep my seat, and intend doing so.” No, in all the changes time has brought, one thing does not change—our politicians are still the same.
In “Our Mutual Friend” our author touches once more on the state of the poor and their terror of “the parish.” No one who has read this novel, with its wealth of characters amazing even for Dickens—for even in his other works you fail to find so many types as Bella Wilfer, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, Fascination Fledgby, the dolls’ dressmaker, Mr. Silas Wegg, Mr. Venus, Rogue Riderhood, the Veneerings, to mention only a few—no one, I say, can ever forget the old washerwoman Betty Higden and her horror of the workhouse, how it haunted her whole life and gave an additional terror to death, that thereby she would fall into the hands of the parish and be buried by it. And in this novel Dickens is as severe on the injudicious charity of philanthropists and faddists as he is upon the callousness of the guardians of the poor. There is no more terrible satire on the mistakes of the education of that age than his delineation of Bradley Headstone. I have never to my recollection read any discussion of this character but I have often thought that in Headstone and Charley Hexam, his pupil, he is giving a warning of the dangers of modern education.
Universal education was not yet adopted in England, which was the most backward of countries in this respect. But it was in the air, and Dickens foresaw that some of the principles adopted would prove serious to the community. He dwells on the mechanical efficiency of the teaching; the learning to write essays on any subject exactly one slate long, for example; on the miscellaneous and useless information imparted; on a Bible teaching which has nothing to do with vital religion. Dickens recognised that the education of all classes was killing individuality, and not fostering moral or spiritual qualities. He recognised that in the type of Charley Hexam it was encouraging a desire for “respectability,” consisting, not in taking one’s coat off to work, but in working in a black coat, which was killing the finer feelings in which the poor often shew to the advantage of the rich. And in Bradley Headstone Dickens points out, that all this smug education was powerless to restrain the elemental ferocity of human nature in the schoolmaster, who looked natural in Rogue Riderhood’s clothes, and not himself in his decent black coat. There was latent in him all the ferocity of a hardened criminal; and recent events are shewing how powerless education is really to civilise the heart of man.
I have spoken of the need of a map of London to understand Dickens, and I shall now take an extract from “Oliver Twist” to illustrate this remark. Oliver has just met with John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful Dodger, who offered to take him to a lodging. “It was nearly eleven o’clock when they reached the turnpike at Islington. They crossed from the Angel into St. John’s Road; struck down the small street which terminates at Sadlers Wells Theatre; through Exmouth Street and Coppice Row; down the little court by the side of the workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley in the Hole, thence to little Saffron Hill the Great and so on to when they reached the bottom of the hill, his (Oliver’s) conductor, catching him by the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field Lane.”