“This behavior of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped claret.”
The novels which depict the really acute phases of labor and poverty,—Sybil, Mary Barton, North and South, Shirley, Alton Locke, Hard Times, (diagnosed by Macaulay as “sullen socialism”), Put Yourself in his Place, Felix Holt,—are apt to have John Barton’s kind of laugh, if any, “a low chuckle, that had no mirth in it.” But the author of the first of these puts into another story a pungent little description:[300]
“The Elysians consisted of a few thousand beautified mortals, the only occupation of whose existence was enjoyment; the rest of the population comprised some millions of Gnomes and Sylphs, who did nothing but work, and ensured by their labour the felicity of the superior class.”
It is inevitable that the artist and the humorist should find their most congenial fields in those relationships that are vital, and not too hampered by the technique of more formal and crystallized institutions. Prisons, Asylums, Courts, and the whole legal machinery, offer a less inviting prospect than do political parties and theories, and the contrast between social strata.
Yet the first third of our list,—Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Dickens,—with the addition of Reade, Trollope, and Butler, did not shrink from contact with red tape. Dickens and Reade have the monopoly of the department of Charities and Corrections, though Lytton asserted the purpose of Paul Clifford to be an indictment against society’s manufacture and destruction of criminals; and of Night and Morning to show the injustice and fallacy of its treatment respectively of vice and crime. In regard to the latter he says, in the Preface:
“Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starvling steal a roll in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil communications to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice—let him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization of his kind—and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee by that Lackey—the Modern World!”
Dickens starts his account with the English prison in Pickwick, and closes it in Little Dorrit. But it is in David Copperfield that he stops to point out the whole thing as a stupid error. On the occasion of a visit to the “immense and solid building, erected at a great expense,” he reflects,—[301]
“I could not help thinking as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a home of refuge for the deserving old.”
Within, he finds the rêgime of solitary, unemployed confinement, and the official bait for professions of penitence, fine breeders of hypocrisy, six years before Reade makes the same point in Never too Late to Mend. But he sees in the exhibitions of No. 27 and No. 28—the Prize Show, the Crowning Glory—Lattimer, and Uriah Heep, an opportunity for his riotous caricature; while to Reade this degeneration of character is a wholly serious matter. Indeed, Reade waxes so wroth over the cruelty, mental and physical, practiced upon the hopeless victims that the satire itself is as scorching as Swift’s, though of course of less clear a flame.
Yet the warden Hawes, chief culprit through main responsibility, is analyzed as after all irresponsible, on psychological and social grounds:[302]