I just finished listening to Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, which I found entertaining although not one of his better efforts. What struck me most was a scene from near the end. There is a poor but virtuous young woman, Lizzie, presented to us from the opening scene as something of a saint. She is pursued by a perfidious schoolmaster named Bradley Headstone, but she rejects him. Besides despising Headstone she is actually in love with another man, a solicitor from a social status far above her own named Rayburn. Rayburn first appears in the story as a rather cold-blooded rake, but he does have a soft spot for Lizzie.
Bradley Headstone is so consumed with jealousy for Rayburn that he conceives a plan to kill him, with the assistance of a low-life scoundrel named Rogue Riderhood. Headstone bludgeons Rayburn severely and knocks him into a river, and Headstone assumes that Rayburn is dead. He is not, of course, since that would prevent things working out as a perfect moral lesson. He is saved by none other than his beloved Lizzie. Rayburn spends days drifting in and out of consciousness, on the edge of death. In his lucid moments he makes it clear that, 1) he wants to marry Lizzie, and 2) that the role of Bradley Headstone in his attack must be covered up. He makes his friends swear that not only will they not tell the authorities that Headstone was involved, but they will do all in their power to prevent this becoming known, telling whatever lies that requires. Because if this was discovered, he says, Lizzie's reputation would be ruined and she would never recover.
You may be thinking, that's stupid, how is Headstone's misbehavior Lizzie's fault? She did nothing to encourage him, having spotted him early on as a vile monster. Why should she suffer?
Ah, you foolish modern person, you only think that because you have no idea what Victorian morality was really like. Rationality has nothing to do with it; balanced judgement of who has done right and wrong has nothing to do with it. Scandal is like an expolding shell full of poison gas, tainting everyone who gets too close. You did nothing wrong? Then why is your named associated with this awful thing? It is not enough to have a clean conscience; you must act so that your name is never, ever mentioned in the same sentence as anything offensive or immoral. If that means covering up crimes – like, say, child abuse – or cutting yourself off from members of your family, then you must do those things.
And the poorer you are, the harder you must work to be thought respectable, and the more your reputation will be wounded by any hint of scandal. Lizzie, a poor girl who marries above her station, is in a terribly vulnerable position, and could only survive as Rayburn's wife by maintaining the most perfect possible moral clean sheet. Rayburn is right, as his friends understand; the scandal of having men fight over her would have ruined Lizzie's future and made her marriage to Rayburn impossible. If Headstone escapes punishment, so be it.
And that, my friends, is why neoreactionaries are whistling in the wind when they say that what the contemporary working class needs is a good dose of Victorian morality. Yes, it did work in its time, giving Britain's 19th-century cities very low crimes rates and so on. But it worked only by putting a terrible fear into everyone, not just of doing wrong, but of ever being even remotely associated with wrongdoing by anyone. It worked by shaming and ruining people we would say had done nothing to deserve it. It was a cruel machine of guilt, shame, gossip, innuendo, slander, and judgment. Fortunately, it is not coming back.
Yes, it did work in its time, giving Britain's 19th-century cities very low crimes rates and so on.
ReplyDeleteDid it, though? Because you literally just got done explaining a story about a crime happening, but then never being reported because the consequences of doing so would be worse than covering up the crime and pretending it never happened.
"Crime rate" doesn't mean "crime rate" - it means "reported crime rate". I imagine that Britain's 19th-century cities indeed had very low rates of crime reporting - and commensurately higher rates of actual crime commission.
Well, you left out the bit about Lizzie's father's reputation, a man who made a living -- not much of one -- fishing bodies out of the river and was accused of killing at least one of them before being found dead himself under mysterious circumstances. At best this man made your skin crawl. Of course, the reader knows Lizzie is a saint, but the denizens of London know no such thing, so she's already starting out life with one strike against her -- like parent, like child, and just think of the guests dear old dad had over. And then strike two, Lizzie moves in with another woman down by the water, not the best of areas. So, yeah, if it came out that the teacher who committed this crime had been visiting her regularly at her home, as was the solicitor, her reputation, such that it was, would have been trashed. But I'm not sure that moral code would have applied to someone else. Lizzie already had a terrible reputation with everyone who never knew her but was told about her.
ReplyDelete@G-Yes, the question of 19th-century crime rates is interesting. About the murder rate, we are pretty confident; it was hard to hide dead bodies. But other crimes were, I'm sure, mostly covered up, starting with child abuse and wife-beating. A lot of rape was probably also concealed.
ReplyDeleteBut from a certain point of view, that doesn't matter, because on the whole the society was quite orderly. Remember that 19th-century cities were growing to sizes nobody had seen before, or not since the decline of Rome. There was a great deal of anxiety on the part of the elite that they would turn into seething pits of horror. Mostly they did not; mostly people got along quite well with their neighbors. Riots did happen but they were rare and mostly inspired by big events, not local affrays. I think, as I have written here before, that the harshness of the moral code was in part a response to social and economic change, with people very worried about moral decay setting in among the dwellers in crowded urban neighborhoods.
"Fortunately, it is not coming back."
ReplyDeleteHehehe. Good Lord, it would be awful if today people would attack other people for just being associated with someone comitting modern crimes, like for example saying some things deemed racist. It's not like on some federated social media there are instances which ban other instances just because they refuse to ban someone.