COVER -> DAY ONE
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Whether it is because of A Christmas Carol, the habitual appearance around Christmas of W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber or simply because I take a few days off work at a time of year which lends itself to cosy, domestic pursuits, it is my custom between mid-December and mid-January to read three Dickens novels.
It might be thought that familiarity with their plots would prompt me to skip some of the digressions but the opposite is the case; each time I re-read a work I take more time over the detail.
This season, with Little Dorritt still to read, I have been concentrating on social history rather than on the central plots.
Nicholas Nickleby, like David Copperfield, has some excellent portrayals of bourgeois and petit bourgeois life but my interest has been most taken by the role of money in Dombey and Son, where there are fine descriptions of the very rich and the very poor.
In the course of reading Dombey, I came across a piece of research conducted by Professor Daniel Dorling of Leeds University (See Footnore 1 below) which has geographically superimposed contemporary London census data on top of its nearest Dickensian equivalent, mainly from the studies of Charles Booth (See Footnote 2 below.) Interestingly, Booth, a radical Right winger, started his investigations with the explicit object of showing that the poor were not so poor after all but his evidence forced him to the opposite conclusion.
It will come as no surprise that Dorling's evidence shows that the rich buy houses in areas where the rich already live and the poor do likewise. It is therefore not surprising that the two maps, more than 100 years apart, are almost identical. The research goes on to show that the only action likely to change this situation is a steady redistribution of income and wealth, an unlikely prospect in a country where both major political parties will go into the forthcoming General Election offering to cut taxes. Not since 1964 has it been possible in Britain for a voter to opt for a substantial increase in taxation to fund redistribution and public services.
There is, however, a very interesting finding (See Footnote 3 below) of which all selfish people should take note; the greater the redistribution of income and wealth the better off are the rich.
This, of course, is obvious. Setting aside those few who inherit wealth and do nothing with it, the majority of rich people reach that happy state through making and selling things; and the more money people have, including the poor, the more they can buy. Indeed, the poorest 20% of the population spend, as opposed to save, the highest proportion of their incomes and spend the largest amount on domestic goods and services. If you doubt me, look no further than the economic development of Pacific Rim countries with barely any natural resources and you will see that they built their exporting capacity on domestic consumption based on redistribution to the bottom quintile.
A day later I saw a Government report (See Footnote 4 below) showing that crime costs Britain 90 billion Dollars per year (excluding, inter alia, criminal compensation and insurance) and, in spite of a handful of notorious cases usually involving fraud, it is well known that criminality is in inverse proportion to income. There is, then, a second good and selfish reason for alleviating poverty.
Something else I noticed in my reading of Dickens is how much alcohol everybody consumes but even more so the poor. There they are, drinking neat spirits before luncheon and a large number of them - again borne out by Booth - spend a high proportion of their lives in a state of complete and almost helpless intoxication.
Whereas in Dickens the whimsicality and flamboyance of the writing make merry what is in truth desperate, for a full understanding of alcohol and degradation Zola is almost unreadably terrible. Having read such accounts, contemporary narratives on narcotics are both less surprising and less terrible.
A third reason for re-distribution is put very well by Alice Marwood, an impoverished, criminalised, sexually exploited young woman, in Dombey: "I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been of my duty to other people. I have wondered now and then ... whether no one ever owed any duty to me."; and speaking of her likely early death: "In good time, there will be more solemnity, and more fine talk, and more strong arm, most likely, and there will be an end of her; but the gentlemen needn't be afraid of being thrown out of work. There's crowds of little wretches, boy and girl, growing up in any of the streets they live in. That'll keep them to it till they've made their fortunes."
Duty, not springing from religious, ethical or even self-indulgent altruism, is supposed to be reciprocal, contractual, the least we are obliged to do.
The final reason for alleviating poverty is that some of us like being generous. There is no one better than Dickens at describing every facet of that generosity from pure altruism to charity exercised as a form of dominance. That spectrum of motives explains much. You can assume that the further a charitable act is towards the power play end of the spectrum the less concerned the donor will be with duty. By and large rich folk prefer to use their wealth to exercise power than anonymously to pay their taxes like the rest of us.
The trouble is, being rich doesn't make you clever.
Society in general and the rich in particular could save us all billions of dollars if risk was more intelligently assessed, if probability was better understood, if a more rational balance was to be struck between the immediate and time further away. Still, the mercy is that such people rarely suffer from their own mistakes. They may not believe in a publicly funded medical service but, barring a fresh outbreak of bubonic plague, they live far enough away from the ravaged poor to be protected from contagion of every sort.
Footnotes:
1. Dorling et al, reported in the British Journal of Medicine, joint research by the Universities of Leeds, Bristol and Cardiff.
2. Booth, Charles: Life and Labour of the People in London (17 Volumes) 1903.
3. Richard Wilkinson, University of Sussex.
4. United Kingdom Home Office: The Economic and Social Costs of Crime.
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