Status and the professional class

 

    The Doubter, watercolour, 2012 

A wonderfully vindictive passage from Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, Chapter X, A Marriage Contract, describes the bridegroom who makes his living by investing his property in shares: "Where does he come from? Shares. Where he is going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he of himself never achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything! Sufficient answer to all: Shares. O mighty Shares!  To set those blaring images so high and to cause us small vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out night and day, 'Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us!'"

Dicken's venom against the non-professional middle class seems particularly deep veined in this his last completed novel.  This little passage might speak powerfully to our embittered times,but elsewhere in the novel the overblown ridicule he bears upon the bourgeoisie is so cartoonish as to no longer function well as satire.  Rather it turns attention round upon Dickens himself.  The bile of his ridicule leaves a nasty taste, however much one sympathises with the rage he bears against those insoucient accumulators of wealth, power and influence.  His contempt is expressed, it seems to me, most forcefully towards poor aesthetic taste, this being a metaphor for moral deficit, or lack of imagination about or care for the plight of others in need.  This metaphorical connection is an imaginative construction, but not an obvious truth:  heightened aesthetic taste does not necessarily go in hand with a social conscience.

The use of such a metaphor might perhaps reflect upon the competition for status between those upstarts who have easily won investment capital and those that struggle for hard-earned intellectual or creative capital.  If so, it may shed light on Dicken's personal anxiety about attaining respectable social position.  Perhaps one of the worst crimes of the C19th nouveau riche was that they did not follow the example of the old aristocracy in seeking a display of magnificence through patronage of the creative and intellectual arts, one that bestowed glory upon those creative entrepreneurs who won favour.  The indifference of the more pragmatic nouveau riche obliged the creative sector to invent new methods of promoting their special status, one achieved elegantly by the next generation following on from Dickens in the invention of the 'avant-garde'.  But this is extensively and subtly explored in David Trotter's 'Paranoid Modernism' (Oxford 2001).  

Meanwhile, Dickens is always a wonderful read: it is always somewhat astonishing to discover in good C19th novels how issues of capitalism that are still relevant are portrayed with such clarity.