Historical origins of Dickens' heroes (Part 3 of a four-part series)
Dickens worked in a deeply traumatizing blacking factory as a 12-year-old. He was horrified at forgetting all that he knew and “had learned at school” from the factory reducing him to a mechanical cog, as illustrated in David Copperfield. All of Dickens’ hero characters, especially the hardworking Little Dorrit and Jenny Wren, are directly based on his blacking factory experience. He could have felt as helpless — in the context of being forced to start an adult-like lifestyle despite being small and vulnerable, not of being unwilling to deal with his own problems — as Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist and Jenny Wren originally were before they found work.
In Paul Schlicke's Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, a young Dickens was obliged to sell off everything he owned, including prized possessions like his father’s heirloom copy of Robinson Crusoe, to pay off his father’s debts. Dickens naturally felt angry, frustrated, and disappointed because Robinson Crusoe was a childhood favorite, and this specific copy had family history value. No one came to the school Dickens’ mother established to recoup family finances, proving it to be nothing but a massive exercise in futility. Dickens considered his father, John Dickens, to be a large oaf; John got the family into this mess through racking up debts. Because of these devastating events, he probably formed a rescuer/warrior type of personality. Twelve-year-old Dickens became similar to 22-year-old Little Dorrit, walking to the blacking factory with no parental supervision and performing the conveyor belt task of adhering labels to bottles, for very long workdays, in an unforgiving environment.
Fortunately, like the child hero emerging from the broken cog, Dickens rose up to find work as a parliamentary reporter, then became the beloved writer. Dickens’ mission to hunt down, serialize, satirize, and expose social problems through scathingly witty stories using heroic characters arose from his visceral trauma at being snatched from his loving, familiar home and pawned off to the blacking factory against his will. He developed a satirical personality to cope with it, then from watching current societal events and writing about them as his work.
Doubtless, Dickens mainly created his artwork and satirized societal ills to help real-life children. He “formulated an idea about the purpose of the childhood years that was new to English society” and wanted the public to “view children with compassion and empathy, to indict society for cruelty and encourage other authors to use their pens to question social norms," as per Knuth. To research Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens and an attorney secretly went on a sting operation to infiltrate the Bowes Academy in Yorkshire and expose the abusive headmaster, William Shaw (the inspiration for Wackford Squeers). "In hard winter, Dickens and Browne travelled by stagecoach up to Yorkshire to see at first hand the ill-famed schools. Dickens carried a letter of introduction from Mitton's partner to a local attorney saying that he was looking for a school to which a poor London widow he knew might send her son… [They] saw the one-eyed William Shaw, proprietor of Bowes Academy, one of the biggest schools in the area. Dickens made a note to himself to research newspaper reports of prosecutions brought against this man 15 years earlier after two boys had gone blind at his school."
"Later," as per John Slater's Dickens biography, "he wrote about this 'scoundrel' … and about his stumbling on a gravestone in the local churchyard erected in memory 'of a boy, eighteen long years old, who had died - suddenly,' the inscription said; I suppose his heart broke … at that wretched place. He added, 'I think his ghost put Smike into my head, upon the spot.'”
Related: Ashi's Literature Corner: The Child Heroes of Dickens, Part 1
The “local attorney” likely inspired John Browdie, the burly Yorkshireman who gives Nicholas Nickleby and Smike anything they might need throughout the book and wishes for them to prosper. From this, the innocent child heroes had a support system based on a heroic figure from Dickens’ real life. Knuth states, “Dickens portrays the innocence of children as inspirational, suggesting that adults would do well to learn from the children around them." Dickens indeed developed his works for an adult audience, but children were likely reading his stories or listening to them at his public readings.
As per John Frazee's article on "Dickens and Unitarianism," Dickens believed more in a system called Unitarianism than in a more mainstream denomination of Christianity, because he did not enjoy badly executed Christian branches, like many Protestant denominations, laced with arguments about spiritual “dos” and “don’ts” and what is (or is not) labeled as sinful. In the Yorkshire schools, there was “a tippling mistress of a Yorkshire school who, Dickens wrote, showed him a long letter from one of her charge's parents "containing a severe lecture (enforced and [allegedly] aided by many texts from Scripture) on his refusing to eat boiled meat." This was the inspiration for Mobbs’ mother, who scolds him for not eating the “cow’s liver broth after his master had asked a blessing on it." He makes fun of Mrs. Clennam for being obsessed with strict rules and hints that she is preparing herself for God’s non-existent retaliation by spending her existence trapped in her own room.
Dickens satirizes Christian charities or companies that seem to be run like businesses, with scathing references to them in Oliver Twist (the all-important beadle and board), Nicholas Nickleby (Squeers pretending to be Christian), and Bleak House (the show-off Mrs. Pardiggle). Dickens still had Christian beliefs, but his works appear intentionally non-denominational, and the Christian content always includes stories of upright characters (individuals, not well-known charities) rising out of trouble with help from a patient God.
