God Bless The Child That's Got His Own

Elaine O'Toole


In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens explores the popular attitudes of his contemporary readership towards social welfare and the treatment of the poor. He does this by setting the book in a time before certain social reforms, reforms Dickens thought inhuman, had been implemented. Great Expectations was published serially in 1860 and 1861. The time period the story encompasses was from 1812 to 1829. It is important to note that the period between these fictional events and the book's publishing was one of social upheaval in Victorian England. Most notably, in 1834, legislation known as "The New Poor Laws" went into effect.

What is interesting about Great Expectations is how Dickens approaches these issues by not discussing them. Nowhere in the novel do we find even the mildest allusion to these social reforms. We do see the injustice of these attitudes quite clearly, however, in the treatment of young Pip.

The brutal treatment Pip receives at the hands of adults is deeply troubling. Not a day seems to pass in which he is not threatened, verbally demeaned, or physically injured in the name of parental supervision or propriety. Popular opinion in Dickens's time viewed poverty as a moral judgment. Those in need of charity were in need not only of alms but, more importantly, of correction. Poverty was a judgment from God upon the wicked, and the wicked deserved the harsh treatment which accompanied charity, as a reminder of their imperfection. We see in this outlook a parallel in the way Pip is viewed by his elders. The treatment Pip experiences as a child reflects in attitude, as inaction, the position of the larger society toward those dependent upon it for survival. Mrs. Joe, among other adults, is to Pip what social perception was to the poor.

Pip is reminded often by Mrs. Joe that he has been "raised by hand" (28; ch. 2). This is a point of pride for Mrs. Joe. It is quite another thing to Pip:

Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in this habit of laying it upon her husband and me, I would suppose that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand. (28; ch. 2)
The phrase being "raised by hand" suggests tender nurture. This is ironic in the face of the treatment Pip experiences at the hands of familiar adults, and it is meant to be ironic. The term "raised by hand" in fact means to have been bottle-fed rather than breast-fed. In this way Dickens makes a statement about the plight of the underclass.

To be raised by hand, or bottle-fed, is an artificial means of support, as is social welfare. Mrs. Joe makes much of the burden and sacrifices she suffered in order to provide Pip with this support. The implication is that Pip should be grateful for what he has been given. Pip is reminded often of his obligation to his sister. At Christmas dinner Mr. Pumblechuck tells him to "Especially be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand" (43; ch. 4). When Mrs. Hubble asks, "Why is it that the young are never grateful," Mr. Hubble's reply, with which the other guests agree, is one which underscores the notion of original sin, and gives carte blanche to those charged with ministering redemption: "Naturally wicsious" (43; ch. 4).

In every aspect of his early life nearly all Pip's encounters with adults follow a similar pattern. Pip is seen as a burden and a nuisance by every adult in his life, with the exception of Joe. Only when he begins to show some income-producing potential for helping these adults rise above their stations in life is Pip given any consideration that might be described as kind. Such is the case when Miss Havisham sends for him to come to her home and play. Overnight, Pumblechook, who had compared Pip to a swine at Christmas dinner, becomes something of a benefactor to Pip, in hopes of improving his own condition as a result of this acquaintance:

I was then delivered over to Mr. Pumblchook, who formally received me as if he were the Sheriff, and who let off upon a speech that I knew he had been dying to make all along: "Boy, be for ever grateful to all friends, but especially unto them which brought you up by hand!" (67; ch. 7)
From this point Pumblechook is only too willing to take credit for Pip's rise in fortune, taking him into his home, testing his mathematics, and always reminding the boy that it is on account of his promotion that Pip has gotten his start in life.

When Pip receives his great expectations everyone assumes they are from Miss Havisham. Pumblechook is beside himself with pride, for he believes that in Pip he has indeed plucked the golden goose from out of the farmyard fray. Pumblechook's language becomes ingratiating. Pip is now, "My dear Young friend,"--if, that is, Pip will allow Pumblechook to call him by such an intimate term (54; ch. 5). Pumblechook asks Pip's indulgence, "And may I--may I--?" "This May I," Pip recounts, "meant might he shake hands" (154; ch. 19).

This treatment, too, is indicative of Dickens's society in that money is the thing that afforded one status and respect. Pip does not become a real person, one worthy of respect or simple human consideration, until he displays some means, in the literal sense of the term. Before this point, Pip, as representative of the underclass, is a nonentity. One such as he does not deserve the consideration given to a human being. We see a drastic change in Pumblechook's attitude toward Pip as a direct result of his new found fortune:

Then he asked me tenderly if I remembered our boyish games at sums, and how he had ever been my favorite fancy and my chosen friend? If I had taken ten times as many glasses of wine as I had, I should have known that he never had stood in that relation towards me, and should in my heart of hearts have repudiated the idea. (155; ch. 19)
This is a scathing indictment of the social attitude prevalent in Dickens's day. Yet Dickens manages to confront the issues of human worth in both the material and spiritual aspect of the term, and points out the disparity between the ideal and the practice of his day without actually sounding accusatory.

Poverty was rampant in Dickens's day and was compounded by the popular belief that those who were poor were so as a result of their own moral condition. K. S. Inglis reports in Churches and the Working Class in Victorian England:

For most of the nineteenth century, Englishmen looked at poverty and found it morally tolerable . . . . A preacher could spend his life surrounded by the squalor of a manufacturing town without feeling any twinge of socially radical sentiment, when he believed that many poor people were suffering for their own sins, and that the plight of the rest was the result of spiritual ordinances which it would be impious to question and of economic laws which it was foolish to resist; charity could alleviate the suffering caused by these laws, but in any case the poor had only to wait until death for the end of all temporal and distinctions. (250-251)
Contemporary attitudes saw poverty as synonymous with vice, sin, and wickedness. This not only gave the moneyed classes all the privilege of wealth, it also allowed them the moral upper hand, giving them free reign to pass whatever measure they felt appropriate to control the underclass. The New Poor Laws underscored these sensibilities. The aim of this legislation was geared not so much toward aiding those in need as it was toward protecting the property of the wealthy, who were tired of seeing their money being handed out without any sense of reciprocation. This was a material society intent upon material gain. Those with money wanted to see some sort of return on their investment. Thus, as M.E. Rose tells us in the essay "The Anti-poor Law Agitation from Popular Movements c. 1830-1850," the government developed a system designed to "be given only in a 'well-regulated' workhouse and not in the form of out-relief doles" (78). The poor law amendment (c. 1834) was a combination of the misguided view of poverty as a moral issue and that of the lassiez-faire attitude of industry. That is to say, one set of principles served to uphold the other. The upper class used this moral high ground to justify allowing the poor conditions suffered by the underclass. In so doing they protected their own interests by keeping down the expense of doing business. In this way these poor laws reflected the imperialism of the government's policies on the whole. Imperialism is protection of certain industries, or interests, to the detriment of others. Simply put, it is a means of maintaining the status quo in favor of the few, the moneyed, and powerful, at the expense of those who lack such resources. This definition, applied to the manner in which the upper classes exploited labor and the poor, could be seen as social imperialism.

When a family fell into despair it was to the workhouse they must turn. Thus, in East End 1888, Charles Booth wrote of this policy:

Families who are below limits of current deficiency in their accounts which were to move them on to the poor house, where they would live as a family no longer. The poor house and the prison, and the whole system, as I conceive it, would provide within itself motives in favour of providence, and sufficient pressure to stimulate industry. (qtd. in Fishmen 82)
These laws allowed society to no longer simply give alms to the needy without gaining something in return. As a result, labor could be obtained at an even cheaper rate, and business could continue to thrive. In this welfare-to-work-system, all able-bodied workers were relegated to workhouses, where they could earn a subsistence less comfortable than workers who survived independent of the state. By design, many were dissuaded from seeking aid. This was precisely the attitude against which Dickens railed most vehemently, as Michael Slater notes in "Dickens's Tract for the Times," from Dickens 1970:
Speaking in Birmingham in February 1844, he declared, to loud applause, "I do not myself believe that the working classes were ever the wanton or mischievous persons they have been so often and so long represented to be." Distressed and angered by what he saw and heard around him he determined to strike a "sledge-hammer blow" for the cause of the poor. (100)
Although, in its own view, it was a strict and morally upstanding society, such attitudes as those shown to the poor were the rule more than the exception. There were many disparities between what was preached and what was practiced. One example, from Arthur L. Hayward's The Days of Dickens, makes note of the many efforts to ban slavery throughout the world, while society "permitted with perfect equanimity a state of slavery in their own country about which one cannot read without boiling over with anger" (105).

Society's inability to reconcile its actions with the consequences, to believe such injustice could occur as a result of their own policy, might be one explanation of how such conditions could have been allowed. As Hayward continues:

Pious women who attended Exeter Hall demonstrations and waxed hysterical over the sufferings of woolly-headed negroes five thousand miles away, not only permitted, but in many cases insisted upon, their chimney being swept by little boys of five and six years old, because they kept the furniture cleaner that if brushes had been used. (105)
We see this same kind of disparity in Great Expectations. We see the inequity, the unfairness of such policy and such perceptions as they are carried out on Pip. Pip is a defenseless child. He has done nothing to deserve the disdain he accrues from the adults in his life, yet his life is a catalog of abuses. We see there is no justification for the attitude directed at Pip. He is not a bad, wicked, or unworthy person; he is merely without power. By extension we see there is no true justification for the attitudes directed towards the underclass. For Pip, as a representative of the poor, has no money, no friends in high places, no expectations of life improving, and no means of changing his lot.

For the underclass, life held little comfort. Sanitation had not changed since Queen Elizabeth's time, outbreaks of disease were common, schooling was minimal to non-existent, work was demeaning, hard, and paid poorly, crime and violence were rampant. Industry was growing at a tremendous rate at the cost of the quality of life, as F. M. L. Thompson argues in The Rise of Respectable Society:

The evidence on working conditions all suggests that early Victorian workers had no leisure, unless it was the enforced leisure of the unemployed. The great enquiries of the 1830s and early 1840s into employment in factories and mines all spoke of extremely long working days of twelve to fifteen hours, six day a week. Hours of work in workshop, domestic, and outwork trades were at least as long, possibly longer than those in the mills; and in agriculture, though lack of daylight brought a shorter working day in winter, the labourer's average working week was the longest as well as the hardest. (272)
As industry grew, so too did the horror of human abuse. The question began to arise, what was the price of  progress; was the glory of the empire to be purchased by the enslavement of its people? Poverty was beginning to be understood as the result of social and political conditions such as imperialism, protectionism, and apathy on the part of the government and the upper classes.

Change occurred slowly, as we see in this excerpt from Derek Fraser's essay, "The Agitation for Parliamentary Reform":

In 1760 many Englishmen were content with the political system because it was a fairly accurate reflection of the social structure in a society dominated by landed wealth. The political system was based on consent, not of the whole nation but of the landed interest. It was the mercantile groups of London and other ports who first began to view their own economic activity as an interest quite distinct from that of the landed oligarchy and as interest deserving of special representation in Parliament. (32)
Gradually the makeup of the socio-political climate was shifting. The rise of the middle class, its accumulation of wealth and demand for representation, meant a new dispersal of power. As a result of this new presence, the options for survival were either assimilation or class wars. By the early nineteenth century, manufacturing groups were demanding the right to send their own representative into the House of Commons. Just as these manufacturers had seen themselves as the force which supported the nation, it would not be many more years before labor would begin to see itself as the force which supported industry. The shift in the way in which the working class saw itself, coupled with growing support for improved conditions from the middle class (historically sympathetic to the plight of the worker), were major contributions which forced the higher echelons of English society to accept change.

The Great Reform Bill of 1832 left four out of five male citizens without the vote; the subsequent Reform Acts 1867 and 1884 extended voting to most citizens. With the Chartist movement, the working class began to organize and seek the vote. Although Chartism failed to win approval in 1848, there was no going back. True social reforms were on the way.

Major social reforms of the nineteenth century included:


Works Cited

"British History 1700-1900." Spartacus Internet Encyclopedia.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. Ed. Janice Carlisle. New York: St. Martin's, 1996.

---. Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. David Parissien. Boston: Hall, 1985.

Fishman, W.J. East End 1888. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988.

Fraser, Derek. "The Agitation for Parliamentary Reform." Popular Movements c. 1830-1850. Ed. J.T. Ward. London: Chaucer P, 1970.

Inglis, K. S. Churches and The Working Class in Victorian England. London: Routledge, 1963.

Parissien, David. "Literature's 'Eternal Duties': Dickens's Professional Creed." The Changing World of Charles Dickens. Ed. Robert Giddings. New York: Vision P, 1983.

Slater, Michael. "Dickens's Tract for the Times." Dickens 1970. Ed. Michael Slater. New York: Stein and Day, 1970.

Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britan 1830-1900. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

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