[Market Economy Guide] Charles Dickens and the British Industrial Revolution

“Dickens criticized how industrialization worsened England’s environment.

If he saw Britain today, wouldn’t he revise his work?”

Charles Dickens was a journalist and novelist who represented Britain’s Victorian era. His best-known work is A Christmas Carol, the novel that adorns Christmas every year with the story of old miser Scrooge reforming himself. His works, including Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities, have been loved by people around the world and have also been adapted into plays, musicals, and films. That is why Dickens is often described as a writer who symbolizes the golden age of the European novel.

The Environment Through Dickens’s Eyes

The 19th century, when Dickens lived, was also Britain’s heyday. The Industrial Revolution was at its height, and Britain enjoyed the age of the empire on which the sun never set. Perhaps for that reason, his works often contain scenes depicting British society during the Industrial Revolution. Dickens portrayed the absurdities of early industrial society—such as cities and people suffering from inequality and environmental pollution—with a cold and realistic eye. In Hard Times, published in 1854, Dickens described the fictional town of “Coketown” as follows:

“Coketown was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, from which interminable serpents of smoke trailed off. A black canal ran through it. And there was a river flowing with water dyed purple and giving off a foul smell.”

The more rapidly a society industrializes, the less clean its environment usually is. As factories are built, buildings go up, and various manufactured goods are produced, income levels rise. But the price is the emergence of all kinds of industrial waste that had never been seen before. In the early stages of industrialization, there is still a shortage of the capital, technology, and know-how needed to purify pollutants.

The Problems of Early Industrialization and Urbanization

And what is lacking is not just purification technology or know-how. Industrialization proceeds together with urbanization. In other words, people pour endlessly from the countryside into the cities. London’s population, which was just under 1 million in the early 19th century, expanded rapidly to 2.7 million in the mid-19th century, when Dickens was actively writing, and then to 6.6 million by the early 20th century. In just one century, the urban population increased more than sixfold.

Yet cities still lacked infrastructure such as housing, public toilets, water and sewage systems, and medical facilities. On the streets of early industrial Europe, horse manure from carriages littered the roads, and cemeteries overflowed with bodies that could not be properly dealt with. Under such conditions, infectious diseases were easy to break out in cities, and once they did, their effects were inevitably devastating. That is why cholera outbreaks were so frequent in modern European cities.

When even these basic needs could not be met, social discontent and disorder could arise very easily. Modern cities were always dirty and always lacking something. This is the background against which the modern but mistaken myth arose—that industrialization, manufacturing, urbanization, and modernization themselves are the root and chief culprit of environmental pollution.

It seems that Charles Dickens, the great literary giant Britain produced, held similar views. Throughout his works, Dickens revealed a critical perspective on the Industrial Revolution. In Hard Times, the smoke of Coketown, described as stretching out “like an endless serpent,” brings to mind the notorious London smog that once claimed thousands of lives. In the Victorian era, London’s yellowish air—a mixture of coal soot and morning fog—was called pea soup, so Dickens’s description of Coketown was hardly an exaggeration.

The Transformation of the River Thames

But looking back on history, the environmental pollution of the industrialization period did not last forever. Today, Britain is one of the most industrialized countries in the world and at the same time one of those with the cleanest environments. The River Thames in London, once called a river of death, is now filled with sightseeing boats and fish.

If Dickens were to see the clean cities of modern Britain, wouldn’t he rewrite much of the passage describing Coketown? The relationship between the environment and industrialization is not as simple as it may seem and must be understood over the course of a long period of time. Although industrialization may harm the environment for a while, in the long run there is perhaps no better way to protect the environment than industrialization and economic development. How is such a reversal possible? Because humanity progresses through industrialization and economic development. And humanity, having advanced in that way, can protect the natural environment better than before. The advanced European countries that enjoy clean environments today are clear evidence of this.

■ Please remember

If Dickens were to see the clean cities of modern Britain, wouldn’t he rewrite much of the passage describing Coketown? The relationship between the environment and industrialization is not as simple as it may seem and must be understood over the course of a long period of time.

Sung-no Choi, President, Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: [시장경제 길라잡이] 찰스 디킨스와 영국 산업혁명

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2019-06-17

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=13&idx=20262