Dickens and the Workhouse by Richardson Ruth;

Author:Richardson, Ruth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 26. Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy: the edition that Dickens bought to teach himself shorthand. Title page and shorthand versions of the opening verses of Genesis, and the Lord’s Prayer. Published in London by Butterworth, 1825.

FIGURE 27. Young Dickens, c.1830. Stipple engraving from a miniature painted by Dickens’s aunt, Janet Barrow, at about the time the 18-year-old Dickens was living in Norfolk Street. She was living in Marylebone at the time. The engraver is unknown.

In a society that was rife with social snobbery, and socially still quite rigid and closed to the working classes and those below them, the book stood for a movement which was coming of age just as Dickens was coming of age himself, to expand the notion of social worth and human potential. Dickens was later a passionate campaigner for wider educational facilities, public libraries, educational institutes, and ragged schools. In 1843 he addressed the inaugural meeting of the Manchester Athenaeum, alongside Benjamin Disraeli, on the contrast between the ‘path jagged of flints and stones’ laid down by brutal ignorance for the homeless to walk upon, and the boon of literacy by which one could join in company:

watching the stars with Ferguson the shepherd’s boy, walking the streets with Crabbe, a poor barber here in Lancashire with Arkwright, a tallow-chandler’s son with Franklin, shoemaking with Bloomfield in his garret, following the plough with Burns, and, high above the noise of loom and hammer, whispering courage in the ears of workers I could this day name in Sheffield and in Manchester.23

The time spent in study, perfecting his shorthand and getting up speed, had helped propel the transformation of the factory boy into a young writer. Within a decade of starting out as a junior clerk, Dickens was the well-known author of Sketches by Boz, Pickwick, and Oliver Twist.

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