Charles Dickens, the Social Justice Warrior

Income inequality and greed are old, old stories

Don’t think this doesn’t happen anymore. It does. Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

You know Ebenezer Scrooge. But do you know Mr. Gradgrind of Hard Times? If Charles Dickens were alive today, he might have made Gradgrind not a schoolmaster but an influencer. Perhaps he’d have a Substack.

Dickens was our first social justice warrior, in that term’s best sense. He presented class warfare as popular entertainment, with many of his stories centered on the poor suffering at the hands of the greedy rich.

Like many Dickens characters, Gradgrind is aptly named. So is his friend Bounderby – a bounder is an old word for scoundrel – who constantly praises himself as a self-made man.

You know these types

They’re still around, many of them churning out self-help nonsense about how anyone can grind their way into wealth.

Gradgrind focuses on facts and science for his students and his own children and forbids poetry and light entertainments. He would certainly approve of the notion that STEM subjects are the only subjects to study and that the arts are worthless.

The success bros like to pretend anybody can become wealthy if they’re willing to grind for a few years. This is news to many working class people who have been grinding all their lives without notable improvement in their lot. (You know, there’s a reason we call them the working class! Why do we persist in casting these working people as lazy?)

In Dickens’ Victorian England, socioeconomic class was a lot more rigid than in the contemporary U.S. – maybe. True, Great Britain has its aristocracy and the U.S. supposedly doesn’t, but the U.S. has high income inequality and modest rates of wealth mobility.

We tell American kids they can be whatever they want to be, but we’ve set up our society to make that unlikely.

The fact that most Americans believe they can achieve whatever they want if they’re willing to work hard means that the poor generally blame themselves for their failures, often not understanding they were set up to fail.

It’s important the poor blame themselves, for that means they will not blame society and possibly try to change it.

The few who do manage to break through are lauded as examples, not as exceptions. (I write more about this subject in my book Strapped.)

Wealthy people aren’t really the problem

Dickens criticized greed, not wealth.

I don’t particularly care that some people have a lot more money than others, up to a point. Billionaires are a parasitic scourge on our society and should be taxed and regulated into multi-millionaires. They would not exist if our system had not been set up to funnel the gains from the labor of millions into the pockets of a few. It’s a rigged game.

If you can make a lot of money by creating something worthwhile, good for you. You’ve read (or at least watched the play or movie!) Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, a contemporary of Dickens.

Hugo’s Jean Valjean became a wealthy factory owner, but only after a sacrificial gift of gold and silver granted him a new start. He wouldn’t have made it otherwise, even though it turned out he had a good head for business. And Valjean’s wealth did not destroy his generous nature. He was a good person when he stole bread to feed his sister’s starving children and he was a good person when he was a wealthy factory owner who adopted Cosette.

OK, maybe Victorian literature isn’t your thing

I can disappear into a Victorian novel for hours, but if you don’t like dated writing styles, read Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a modern retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield. The new book stands on its own, but if you have read Copperfield, you’ll enjoy hundreds of “I see what you did there!” moments in Copperhead. It richly deserved its Pulitzer.

Damon Fields – Demon is his nickname and he’s called “Copperhead” because of his red hair – grows up in contemporary Appalachia, not Victorian London. Both books begin with the main character’s birth, but Kingsolver’s version will make you gasp and immediately want to tell someone what you just read. It’s the most compelling opening scene I can recall.

Young Damon/Demon’s trials and poverty are even more difficult than David’s – at least David didn’t get caught up in the Appalachian opioid crisis. Toward the end of the novel, Damon’s more scholarly friend Tommy Traddles (the character appears by that name in both the original and the retelling) helps Damon understand the divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, and the “the two kinds of economy people, land versus money”:

“Demon! I know why we’re the dogshit of America, it’s a war, and it’s been going on the whole time, and nobody gets it, not even us.”

What follows is the best analysis of class warfare I’ve ever read, albeit written in Damon’s vernacular. If anything, that strengthens it.

You can read Hard Times free here.

You can buy Demon Copperfield here.

You can read David Copperfield free here.

You can read Les Misérables free here.

You can buy Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class here. If you want to read Strapped and cannot afford to purchase it, send an email to michelleteheux@gmail.com and put “Strapped” in the subject line, and I will send it to you for free.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. My new book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules.

Did you know that originally the term “bootstrapping” was used sarcastically to describe an impossible task? Yet now, the meaning has morphed into the opposite.

I invite you to give it a try. Reach back, grab your bootstraps and pull with all your might. How did that work out for you?

There’s a reason we tell people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps even though we know it can’t be done. It’s one of the ways people in power keep the rest of us from complaining that we’re being screwed. We keep trying and trying and blaming ourselves when we have trouble. Of course we blame ourselves. Who else can we blame?

This is not a self-help book because you cannot single-handedly fix what’s wrong with the system by working harder or working smarter. There’s a good possibility that some of your problems are out of your hands.

This book was not written for the top 10 percent or for anyone who had life handed to them on a silver platter.

Instead, this book is for every working-class, lower-class and even middle-class person who has done everything right but still feels strapped.