The Ends of History by Christina Crosby

Author:Christina Crosby [Crosby, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 19th Century, Social History
ISBN: 9780415623049
Google: DEiwgToM-O8C
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-10-09T15:54:55+00:00

The History of the People

In Little Dorrit, then, and in Household Words and his correspondence, Dickens represents the social in profoundly nostalgic terms, creating a melodramatic, mythological system in which “history” is a matter of loss and gain, of absence and presence, as in the history of the Clennam household which organizes the multiple plots of the novel. Yet, as we have seen, Dickens has been read as a social historian of sorts, a novelist whose work is related to both the emergent social sciences and to history as the newly acknowledged ground of social life. In fact, the melodramatic fix, which depends on the constructed absence of the maternal, is an exaggerated and intensified version of the nineteenth-century fix on history, which constructs the past as the ever receding ground of the present. Melodrama, then, is in Victorian England much more than a set of literary conventions; it is a way of construing “society” and “history” that consolidates the middle class, its identity and its values.

The range of melodrama is suggested by a comparison of Dickens’s writing with the series of articles on “labour and the poor” which Henry Mayhew wrote for the Morning Chronicle newspaper. Dickens and Mayhew are often paired, Mayhew’s non-fictional writing being taken as the historical proof of Dickens’s novelistic representations of the urban poor. In such readings, Dickens is said to achieve a heightened, generalized symbolic representation, while Mayhew, as a “systematic empirical investigator,” is thought to produce work that is unmarked by melodrama, that records the historical truth of life in the East End of London.46 Yet Mayhew’s work, while usually not very melodramatic in form, is none the less inescapably melodramatic in its conception. How could it be otherwise when his subject is the lower classes in London, the people whose lives are so far from the middle-class ideal, yet who live in families and are “like us”? It is this poignant resemblance which Thackeray responds to in Mayhew’s “Letters.” Writing in Punch as Mayhew was publishing in the Chronicle, he declares,

What a confession it is that we have all of us been obliged to make! A clever and earnest-minded writer gets a commission from the Morning Chronicle newspaper, and reports upon the state of our poor in London: he goes amongst labouring people and poor of all kinds – and brings back what? A picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it….47

Mayhew claimed that his survey was “the first real History of the People that has ever been attempted in any country whatsoever,” but Thackeray reads it as romance. Indeed, he even sees a melodramatic tableau, a sensational and sentimental “picture of human life” that reveals the hidden humanity of “our poor.”

When Mayhew most assiduously frames and composes his letters he does produce a wonderful, awful, piteous, exciting, and terrible picture of human life. Such conventionally melodramatic tableaux, though more the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.