Work

The Social Climate

Ford Madox Brown's Work, begun in 1852, is an allegory embodying the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle's maxim that "all true work is Religion." Paying tribute to those who work--either with their hands or with their minds--it demonstrates the strong social concern felt by many Victorian artists and thinkers, among them Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, and Tennyson. It also provides a useful way of discussing the social tensions underlying Victorian society.

The setting is Hampstead, a London suburb, and as Tom Prideaux (The World of Whistler: 1834-1903. New York: Time-Life, 1970), notes,

Carlyle himself is to the right of the central group of street laborers, glancing at the viewer. He stands with F. D. Maurice, a benefactor of the working class; the two men symbolize "brainworkers." On the road behind them cluster the unemployed, a few of whom have found short-term jobs carrying sandwich boards in a political campaign. The idle rich sit on horseback behind the excavation. A tattered flower vendor (left) and ragged children in the foreground are victims of society's failure to provide education and employment. In a sonnet he wrote about Work, Brown chided the fashionable lady . . . under the blue parasol for lavishing care on her "scarlet-coated hound" (left, foreground) instead of on the abandoned waifs. (74)

That contrast between rich and poor is at the heart of the social writings of Thomas Carlyle, the "Chelsea Sage" whose ideas provide a key to understanding the Victorian era. His ideas echo throughout such works as Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and Hard Times (1854); Disraeli's Sybil (1845); Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854-55); and Charles Kingsley's Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850).

As an example, consider the following from the end of Book 2 of Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil:

    "Well, society may be in its infancy," said Egremont slightly smiling; "but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed."
    "Which nation?" asked the younger stranger, "for she reigns over two."
    The stranger paused; Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly.
    "Yes," resumed the younger stranger after a moment's interval. "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws."
    "You speak of--" said Egremont, hesitatingly.
    "THE RICH AND THE POOR."

Notably absent from Brown's pictorial account is any reference to the poor of the industrial North. Their plight is evident in a passage from Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton:

As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which overflowed and stagnated. Heaps of ashes were the stepping-stones, on which the passer-by, who cared in the least for cleanliness, took care not to put his foot. Our friends were not dainty, but even they picked their way, till they got to some steps leading down to a small area, where a person standing would have his head about one foot below the level of the street, and might at the same time, without the least motion of his body, touch the window of the cellar and the damp muddy wall right opposite. You went down one step even from the foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived. It was very dark inside. The window-panes many of them were broken and stuffed with rags, which was reason enough for the dusky light that pervaded the place even at mid-day. After the account I have given of the state of the street, no one can be surprised that on going into the cellar inhabited by Davenport, the smell was so foetid as almost to knock the two men down. Quickly recovering themselves, as those inured to such things do, they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband's lair, and cried in the dark loneliness.

Clearly these accounts taken by themselves are a bit one-sided, but they do provide a counterpoint to the jingoistic optimism that we saw in Cruikshank's The British Beehive.