O God! who by Thy prophet’s hand
Didst smite the rocky brake,
Whence water came, at Thy command,
Thy people’s thirst to slake…
Listening to the endless string of words streaming out of his oversized head, I realized for the first time that Newt Gingrich is an escapee from a Charles Dickens novel. Only the great 19th-century “Defender of the Poor” could have come up with the name “Newt Gingrich” for a lizardy millionaire villain: that’s up there with Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Seth Pecksniff and Wackford Squeers (my favorite).
Even Gingrich’s dialogue seems to have been prompted by the English master. He urged the “hippies” occupying Wall Street to “Go get a job, right after you take a bath!” Well, Dickens might have said that a little better, but the sentiment fits right in with Squeers and Scrooge: “Are there no prisons, sir? Are there no workhouses?”
Not for the first time, I’m thinking how much we could use an American Charles Dickens writing for us now. Next Tuesday will be the bicentennial of his birth. He was born Feb. 7, 1812; and we’d do well to pick up one of his 14 novels and let it carry us off into a long-ago — but recognizable — world, a place where injustice and hypocrisy grew fat and rich, frozen in time by Dickens’ characters.
The Republican debates gave us some marvelous Dickensian moments. When Jon Huntsman, our former United States Ambassador to China, said a few words in Mandarin one evening, you could practically see his fellow candidates — not to mention the audience — drool at this obvious slip into socialistic intellectual elitism, this despite Huntsman having worked in the Reagan White House, and served as Ambassador to Singapore under the first President Bush. (Remember, they ridiculed Senator Kerry for speaking French.) Dickens would have moved his pen with authorial glee from one candidate to the other as they laughed at this show-off.
Dickens’ power came from his first-hand experience of poverty, when his father was tossed into prison for not paying a debt: the novelist’s outrage was personal. During this time he joined the crowded ranks of child laborers, pasting labels on shoe polish bottles, and the shame of those days remained vivid all of his life: in his stories, his poverty-stricken children, saints and rascals at the same time, leap from the page. When Ronald Reagan made up the bogus Cadillac Mary anecdote, he was playing on existing anti-black and anti-poor stereotypes to make a mean-minded point — poor people (unlike bankers!) might game the system. But with Dickens’ child criminals, like the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist, his point was that the system had failed the child; and indeed Dickens’ novels did much to create the Factory Acts which gradually reduced child labor in England — laws which Gingrich would call “truly stupid.”
Although, like Shakespeare, Dickens was a genius who somehow mostly educated himself, he realized far ahead of his time that education was the way out of poverty, and that a good education was extremely hard for a poor child to find.
Dickens wasn’t a sentimental softie, but a hard-eyed satirist influenced by William Hogarth’s 18th-century caricatures like “A Harlot’s Progress” and “A Rake’s Progress.” Unlike the millionaires who comprise our Congress and Senate, he was famous for walking daily and nightly through the teeming streets of London, collecting images and gathering his thoughts.
His subject was the indifference of the rich toward those less fortunate: in today’s terms, the GOP’s fight against minimum wage, unemployment compensation, unions and “entitlements” in general (except tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations). He didn’t want to “tip the scales” so much as to make them even.
Speaking of the Republican debates, another Dickens quote swims to mind as I hear the candidates repeat en masse untruths like “Obamacare’s death panels,” “our food stamp president,” or “Obama’s job-killing stimulus”: “Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got from it.”
Happy birthday, old warrior.
…Strike, now, upon this granite wall,
Stern, obdurate, and high;
And let some drops of pity fall
For us who strive and die!
—Both quotes from “The Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers,” by Charles Dickens
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2012.