{"id":483,"date":"2012-08-27T10:12:26","date_gmt":"2012-08-27T08:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=483"},"modified":"2012-08-27T10:12:26","modified_gmt":"2012-08-27T08:12:26","slug":"1844-and-1902-or-between-engels-and-london-what-good-is-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/08\/27\/1844-and-1902-or-between-engels-and-london-what-good-is-capitalism\/","title":{"rendered":"1844 AND 1902, OR BETWEEN ENGELS AND LONDON: WHAT GOOD IS CAPITALISM? <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

NOTE: This post was written on 26 July<\/p>\n

<\/strong>Preparing for my Victorian Literature subject next semester \u2013in particular for Oliver Twist<\/em>\u2013 I read back-to-back Friedrich Engels\u2019 The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844<\/em> (published 1845 in German, 1887 in English) and Jack London\u2019s The People of the Abyss <\/em>(1902). Each is a fascinating account of the stay of the author (complete with proletarian disguise in London\u2019s case) among \u2018the other half\u2019 as Jacob Riis would put it, or the other \u2018nation\u2019 in Benjamin Disraeli\u2019s lexicon. I\u2019ll grant that I have not read these books just to better understand what Dickens fictionalised in Oliver Twist <\/em>(1838) and then again far more bleakly in Hard Times<\/em> (1854), but to find some kind of spurious comfort in the idea that rich Victorian Britain failed worse than current poor Spain in protecting her weakest.<\/p>\n

Reading Engels\u2019 thorough account of the misery brought about by the first tides of the Industrial Revolution I have a feeling not dissimilar from what I felt when reading Roger Casement\u2019s Congo Diary<\/em> (1902) and comparing it to Heart of Darkness<\/em> (1897): I\u2019m quite annoyed that not even the best Victorian fiction was up to the task of representing the horrific reality of the poorest, whether in central England or Africa. It irks me that in Oliver Twist<\/em> Dickens can so rely on a shameless sentimental plot to save the angelic Oliver from a worse-than-death fate. Likewise, it irks me that Conrad\u2019s prose poem focuses on Kurtz rather than on his victims. Then I pause to think that Dickens, not Engels, has left us the most vivid portrait of the tyrannical abuse that the workhouse system heaped on the poor. Again likewise, Conrad, not Casement gave us the most crushing portrait of colonialist greed. Yet, and this is a big yet, for a moment I\u2019m tempted to simply drop Dickens and teach Engels \u2013not to worry, I\u2019ll just use Engels\u2019 criticism of the workhouse as a bitter side dish.<\/p>\n

Jack London was roughly the same age as Engels (around 25) when he reported on the horrors of the East End, where tomorrow the 2012 Olympic Games will finally allow the Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, to chuck out the proles and make room for gentrification. Engels and London, both foreigners curious about the richest empire of their time, found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer squalor they met. Engels was writing at a time when children could still be employed up to 10 hours a day (there was no state-sponsored primary education until 1871); he wonders how far the degradation of human life will go in an England subjected to periodical economic crisis. London visited his namesake city almost 60 years later, at the time of Edward VII\u2019s coronation, to report on the effect of that terrible squalor on subsequent generations. He stresses that this is a prosperous time for Britain; still, the systematic abuse that Engels described prevails with little improvement.<\/p>\n

Surely I\u2019m not the first reader to be upset by London\u2019s last chapter, in which he wonders whether \u201cCivilization [has] bettered the lot of man\u201d. He compares the Inuit folk of Alaska, a \u201cvery primitive people\u201d who are \u201chealthy, and strong, and happy\u201d except at times of occasional famine with the citizens of London\u2019s East End. His conclusion is that whereas the Inuit suffer only in \u201cbad times\u201d East Enders \u201csuffer from a chronic condition of starvation.\u201d He notes that \u201ceach babe (…) is born in debt to the sum of $110. This is because of an artifice called the National Debt,\u201d which rings a bell here in Spain. London is sharp: \u201cSince Civilization has failed to give the average Englishman food and shelter equal to that enjoyed by the Inuit, the question arises: Has Civilization increased the producing power of the average man? If it has not increased man’s producing power, then Civilization cannot stand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, it doesn\u2019t \u2013just replace \u2018Civilization\u2019 for \u2018Capitalism\u2019 and you\u2019ll see how 110 years later, although the extreme squalor is gone from the streets of Western Europe (at least, I assume so), the same truth stands: not even the richest countries in the world, whether the United States or China, can prevent their poorest citizens from suffering much \u2013indeed, they don\u2019t care. Here in Spain we were satisfied, believing we had managed to strike a happy medium but, sadly, this has proved as delusional as the idea that Victorian Britain got \u2018Civilization\u2019 right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOTE: This post was written on 26 July Preparing for my Victorian Literature subject next semester \u2013in particular for Oliver Twist\u2013 I read back-to-back Friedrich Engels\u2019 The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (published 1845 in German, 1887 in English) and Jack London\u2019s The People of the Abyss (1902). Each is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,45,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heart-of-darkness","category-oliver-twist","category-victorian-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}