Weekend Economists Going to the Dickens December 16-18, 2011

[Demeter]

19. If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would get the Newt Gingrich seal of approval.

If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would get the Newt Gingrich seal of approval. Not the adult Dickens, but Dickens the child laborer.

Dickens didn't clean toilets, but as a 12-year-old who would later become the most widely read author in England - with a vast following in the United States - Dickens was forced to work in decrepit, unsanitary conditions.

Describing his childhood work environment to a biographer, Dickens remembered::

The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again.

You can see Newt grinning at how misery and slave wages build character.

As a child, Dickens took this nightmarish and impoverished work because his father was jailed in the infamous British Marshalsea debtors' prison, and Charles' spartan wages helped pay for his dad's basic needs while at Marshalsea - as well as contributing to the care of the rest of his family.

Dickens grew up to deplore the exploitative working conditions of industrializing England - and social and economic justice became key themes in his novels and columns. He lived long enough to see the UK start to institute civilized standards of decency toward minors and debtors.

So, the author of "Oliver Twist" and "David Copperfield," would be - no doubt - astonished to see that in 21st century America not only do we have a serious effort underway to role back child labor laws, but we also have the re-establishment of debtors' prisons...


Oh, how it all must warm the cockles of Gingrich's plan to move America back a century or two. As for the rats that scurried by as Dickens the child worked for a few shillings, Gingrich is not heartless. He definitely has empathy for the rats.

Mark Karlin
Editor, BuzzFlash at Truthout