Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens on 19th-century poverty

Here's a book review that features my favourite writers on Victorian poverty – the two Charlies. That's Charles Masterman and Charles Dickens.

The book reviewed is Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 by Elizabeth Hurren, the reviewer is John Prebble, and it appears in the London Review of Books for 5 October 2012:

Like everyone who has written about Victorian poverty, she’s obstructed by the problem identified by the Liberal politician Charles Masterman in 1902. "We are very silent," the collective poor say in Masterman's From the Abyss; "so very silent that no one to this hour knows what we think ... or why we think it."

That remains true even now. From all the multitude of workhouse voices, not one has yet been recovered that says "this is how it was," "this is what we did," "this is how I felt." Victorian poverty is mute either because, in Masterman's words, it was "living for the most part with no articulate expression", or because it was too ashamed to speak. 

The Victorians who wrote about it were strangers in its midst: either middle-class missionaries, philanthropists and sociologists perceiving the London slums as "the undiscovered country of the poor" and "the dark continent ... within easy walking distance of the General Post Office", and casting themselves as intrepid explorers or scientific investigators; or slumming journalists (James Greenwood, Jack London, Robert Sherard and, later, Orwell) trying to share an experience that they could never penetrate because they knew they could always escape. 

And there was Dickens, who lived in denial about his childhood labour in a blacking factory and displaced his trauma onto martyred surrogates in other hells – the workhouse, Yorkshire schools, Lancashire mills, slums like Tom-all-Alone's. Dickens confronting his own past is Oliver Twist confronting his. Having escaped into bourgeois security, Oliver revisits the town of his childhood, but he sees the workhouse only from outside, and his old acquaintances only as faces at the windows.

Robert Sherard, as we saw a few months ago, was the grandson of the fearsome Lord Harborough and Oscar Wilde's first biographer.