NICE WORK
'In the i840s and i85os,' says Robyn, 'a
number of novels were published in England which have a certain
family resemblance. Raymond Williams has called them "Indus- trial
Novels" because they dealt with social and economic problems arising
out of the Industrial Revolution, and in some cases described the nature
of factory work. In their own time they were often called "Condition
of England Novels", because they addressed themselves directly to
the state of the nation. They are novels in which the main characters
debate topical social and economic issues as well as fall in and out of
love, marry and have children, pursue careers, make or lose their
fortunes, and do all the other things that characters do in more
conventional novels. The Industrial Novel contributed a distinctive strain
to English fiction which persists into the modern period - it can
be traced in the work of Lawrence and Forster, for instance. But it
is not surprising that it first arose in what history has called "the
Hungry Forties". 'By the fifth decade of the nineteenth century the
Indus- trial Revolution had completely dislocated the
traditional structure of English society, bringing riches to a few and misery
to the many. The agricultural working class, deprived of a subsistence on
the land by the enclosures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, thronged to the cities of the Midlands and the North where the economics
of laissez-faire forced them to work long hours in wretched conditions for
miserable wages, and threw them out of employment altogether as soon as
Acre was a downturn in the market. 'The workers' attempt to defend
their interests by forming trades unions was bitterly resisted by the
employers. The working class met even stiffer resistance when
they tried to secure political representation through the
Chartist Movement.' Robyn glances up from her notes and sweeps the
audience with her eyes. Some are busily scribbling down every word she
utters, others are watching her quizzically, chewing the ends of their
ballpoints, and those who looked bored at the outset are now staring
vacantly out of the window or diligently chiselling their initials into
the lecture-room furniture. 'The People's Charter called for
universal male suffrage. Not even those far-out radicals could apparently
contemplate the possibility of universal female suffrage.'
All the students, even those who have been staring out
of the window, react to this. They smile and nod or, in a friendly
sort of way, groan and hiss. It is what they expect from Robyn Penrose,
and even the rugby-playing boys in the back row would be mildly
disappointed if she didn't produce this kind of observation from time to
time.
There were two climactic moments in the history of
the Chartist Movement. One was the submission of a petition, with
millions of signatures, to Parliament in 1839. Its rejection led to a series of
industrial strikes, demonstrations, and repressive measures by the
Government. This is the back- ground to Mrs Gaskell's novel Mary Barton
and Disraeli's Sybil. The second was the submission of another
monster petition in 1848, which forms the background to
Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke. 1848 was a year of revolution throughout
Europe, and many people in England feared that Chartism would bring
revolution, and perhaps a Terror, to England. Any kind of working-class
militancy tends to be presented in the fiction of the period as a
threat to social order. This is also true of Charlotte
Bronte's Shirley (1849). Though set at the time of the
Napoleonic wars, its treatment of the Luddite riots is clearly an
oblique comment on more topical events.'
.. '
My point is simply this,' says Vie. 'We're producing
too many different things in short runs, meeting small orders. We
must rationalize. Offer a small range of standard products at competitive
prices. Encourage our customers to design their systems around our
products.'
'Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times embodies the spirit of
industrial capitalism as Dickens saw it. His philosophy is utilitarian. He
despises emotion and the imagination, and believes only in Facts. The
novel shows, among other things, the disastrous effects of this philosophy
on Mr Gradgrind's own children, Tom, who becomes a thief, and Louisa,
who nearly becomes an adulteress, and on the lives of working people
in the city of Coketown which is made in his image, a dreary place
containing: several streets all very like one another, and many more
streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one
another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound
upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day
was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of
the last and the next. 'Opposed to this alienated, repetitive way of
life, is the circus - a community of spontaneity, generosity and
crea- tive imagination. "You mutht have us, Thquire^ says
the lisping circus master, Mr Sleary, to Gradgrind.
"People mutht be amuthed." It is Cissie, the despised
horserider's daughter adopted by Gradgrind, who proves the
redemptive force in his life. The message of the novel is clear:
the', alienation of work under industrial capitalism can be over- come
by an infusion of loving kindness and imaginative play, represented by
Cissie and the circus.' Robyn pauses, to allow the racing pens to catch up
with her discourse, and to give emphasis to her next sentence: 'Of
course, such a reading is totally inadequate. Dickens' own ideological
position is riddled with contradiction.' The students who have been
writing everything down now look up and smile wryly at Robyn Penrose, like
victims of a successful hoax. They lay down their pens and flex ^
their fingers, as she pauses and shuffles her notes preparatory to the next
stage of her exposition.
.
It is interesting how many of the industrial
novels were written by women. In their work, the ideological
contradictions of the middle-class liberal humanist attitude to
the Industrial Revolution take on a specifically
sexual character.'
At the
mention of the word 'sexual', a little ripple of interest stirs the rows
of silent listeners. Those who have been daydreaming or carving their
initials into the desktops sit up. Those who have been taking notes
continue to do so with even greater assiduousness. People cease to cough
or sniff or shuffle their feet. As Robyn continues, the
only interference with the sound of her voice is the occasional ripping
noise of a filled-up page of A4 being hurriedly detached from its parent
pad.
It hardly needs to be pointed out that
industrial capital- ism is phallocentric. The inventors, the engineers,
the factory owners and bankers who fuelled it and maintained it, were
all men. The most commonplace metonymic index 9 of industry - the factory
chimney - is also metaphorically a phallic symbol. The characteristic
imagery of the industrial landscape or townscape in nineteenth-century
literature - tall chimneys thrusting into the sky, spewing ribbons
of black smoke, buildings shaking with the rhythmic pounding of mighty
engines, the railway train rushing irresistibly through the passive
countryside - all this is saturated with male sexuality of a dominating
and destructive kind.
For
women novelists, therefore, industry had a complex fascination. On the
conscious level it was the Other, the alien, the male world of work, in
which they had no place. I am, of course, talking about middle-class
women, for all women novelists at this period were by definition
middle-class. On the subconscious level it was what they desired to heal
their own castration, their own sense of lack.'
Some of
the students look up at the word 'castration', admiring the cool poise
with which Robyn pronounces it, as one might admire a barber's expert
manipulation of a cut-throat razor. '
We see
this illustrated very clearly in Mrs Gaskell's North and South. In this
novel, the genteel young heroine from the south of England, Margaret, is
compelled by her father's reduced circumstances to take up residence in
a city called Milton, closely based on Manchester, and comes into
social contact with a local mill-owner called Thornton. He is a very pure
kind of capitalist who believes fanatically in the laws of supply and
demand. He has no compassion for the workers when times are bad and wages
low, and does not ask for pity when he himself faces ruin.
Margaret is at first repelled by Thornton's harsh business ethic,
but when a strike of workers turns violent, she acts impulsively to
save his life, thus revealing her unconscious attraction to him, as well
as her instinctive class allegiance. Margaret befriends some of the
workers and shows compassion for their sufferings, but when the crunch
comes she is on the side of the master. The interest Margaret takes in
factory life and the processes of manufacturing - which her
mother finds sordid and repellent - is a displaced manifestation
of her unacknowledged erotic feelings for Thomton. This comes out
very clearly in a conversation between Margaret and her mother, who
complains that Margaret is beginning to use factory slang in her speech.
She retorts:
"And
if I live in a factory town, I must speak factory language when I want it.
Why, Mamma, I could astonish you with a great many words you never
heard in your life. I don't believe you know what a
knobstick is
"Not
I, child. I only know it has a very vulgar sound; and I don't want to hear
you using it."' Robyn looks up from the copy of North and South
from which she has been reading this passage, and surveys
her audience with her cool, grey-green eyes. 'I think we all know
what a knobstick is, metaphorically.' The audience chuckles gleefully, and
the ballpoints speed across the pages of A4 faster than ever.
(David Lodge, Nice Work, Penguin, 1988 pp.72-80)