The Empire Strikes Back: Dickens on the Rioting Colonists

Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (The Nineteenth Century Series) (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 210 pp. + xii, $89.95, cloth. Among major Victorian writers we think more readily of Thackeray and Kipling than of Dickens in connection with the British Empire, or as reflecting on British colonialism or on its control of huge areas of the world. Dickens did not consider the Empire in any general sense. He said nothing directly about it as a source of wealth, problematic or not, and writes only once (I believe) of Britain's holding a country by force. (Pilgrim Letters, v11, 267) In his letters he mentioned the Empire as such just three times in all. The colonies to be sure had their uses. He was interested for example in emigration. Two of his sons went to Australia, two more to India, and one of the latter went on to Canada. He and Mrs. Coutts set up Urania Cottage with the express purpose of sending the residents abroad, mostly to Australia. They did so responsibly, looking into such things as the demand for British labor there. In his fiction Dickens moves characters to and from the colonies. But as for pondering the vast range of Empire, from New Zealand to India, Canada, tropical and southern Africa, and, yes, Ireland, Dickens does not do so, and does not pay attention unless colonial rule is threatened by uprisings and riots. Where then is Ms. Moore's subject? It emerges from the confluence of these uprisings and riots with Dickens' views of British government, with his concern for the poor and downtrodden, and his deep fears of mob violence. Two of these elements change as their contexts change. The latter two are comparatively fixed and unchanging and may be considered first. Dickens's passionate concern for the English masses, for their being kept in poverty and virtual slavery, resonates in and is deepened by what he learns of English colonial practice among the subject peoples. But once those peoples rise in retaliative fury, Dickens draws back however much he agrees with the need for reform. For him, as for almost all his middle- and upper-class contemporaries, class and racial violence stirred conservative fears. The French Revolution and its echoes through Europe and at home were never far from the national imagination. Established England countenanced no tendency toward violence anywhere, even to aid the poor and the underclasses. If vigorous repressive measures needed to be resorted to, so be it. During Dickens' lifetime such violence and repression focused British attention on three widely separated colonies: India, Jamaica, and Ireland. Seen from the heights of time and generalization, a pattern of common elements can be made out. In each country a long misused class or race of people burst out in retaliative fury, India most notably at Cawnpore in 1847, Jamaica in 1865, Ireland, also most notably, in 1867. In the first two cases private corporations, the East India Company and the agricultural interests of Jamaica, were protected by standing British garrisons with more to be called upon to restore order and the status quo. Irish violence, closest to home, spilled over into England with the attack on Clerkenwell prison. Home forces and the legal system reacted rapidly, suppressing it and punishing its leaders, not always with punctilious care. Having chosen to write a book on this topic, Grace Moore has another problem. Neither Dickens nor the British at large gave the risings anything like equal attention. To bring them together early on, she sets out an extended theoretical argument on the formation of national identity and creation of the Racial Other. She argues from them that British assumptions toward themselves as rulers and toward the colonies as ruled fall into recognizable patterns. Thereafter fully ninety percent of the book is given over to British relations with India and roughly five percent each to Jamaica and Ireland. …

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