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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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What's interesting is that I've long held the opposite intuition -- but that certainly comes from having read the works of classical opponents of Industrial Britain like Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, who valorized rural, pre-industrial ways of living. No one can read Hard Times and come away with a positive impression of Victorian factory labor.

I was about to mention Dickens (he certainly did not think Victorian England was a "high trust, low crime" society), but I don't think he valorized some golden pre-industrial pastoral age like Tolkien did. Tolkien was reacting to the world wars; Dickens was reacting to his personal experience as a child laborer with a father in debtors' prison.

And yet his most famous work, A Christmas Carol, which he described as "a sledgehammer blow for the poor," ends with the wealthy capitalist seeing the error of his ways and adopting the very traditional concept of noblesse oblige, "endeavour[ing] to assist the struggling family" of Bob Cratchit, his employee. I read him, and see very clearly the arguments of classical conservatives who opposed industrial capitalism with all the fervor of a Marxist.

George Orwell, another author with contempt for the condition of the working masses but ambivalence towards socialism, wrote of Dickens that:

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him.

If you don't think of the Shire when you read this, I don't know what to tell you.

Dickens obviously hated the Tories, but I believe he had more in common with them than he understood. He was a commoner who appealed to noblesse oblige, he was a city boy who wrote of the slow life, his happy endings revolved around domestic bliss and social calls. He may not have known much of agricultural labor, but he certainly seems to idealize the lifestyle of the rural aristocracy. His complaint, of course, was that the aristocratic lifestyle was not accessible to the common worker. Perhaps he would like our condition today -- I have never thought of Dickens as an exceptionally spiritual man.

All that to say, yeah, I think you're right and I made a mistake. But there was something I was gesturing at, some commonality between the epic dreaming of Tolkien and the saccharine dreaming of Dickens, some sort of distinctly British idealism and whimsy that unites everything from Jacob Marley to Albus Dumbledore. There is an anti-industrialism and pastoral idealism embedded in both Dickens and Tolkien, even if Dickens did not realize how pastoral his vision really was.

Perhaps the word you're looking for is gentility. The genteel life of the landed aristocracy in 19th century Britain was something of a paradise -- for them, that is. It must have exercised a powerful magnetic attraction, even for people who understood foundations of deprivation it stood on. Tolkien idealized it rather explicitly: Bilbo's party is practically something out of a countryside daydream for the Midcountry gentry.

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