John Leech "Ignorance and Want" A Christmas Carol (1843)
old man looking at two children with ghost

Description: 

"Ignorance and Want" is one of John Leech's 8 illustrations for Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. The three quartered paged, black and white wood engraving vignette occurs in Stave three where Scrooge is confronted by his own greed with the help of the two children who accompany the second of the three spirits. The two children, called Ignorance and Want, symbolize the uncontrolled booming of the industrial and capitalistic society of the Victorian era. Furthermore, the factories illustrated in the background of the image allow Leech to further extend the social issues raised by Dickens in the text. In fact, this illustration explicitly calls out the working conditions in the factories in which children as young as eight years old would work for 16 hours a day. This meaning is made clear as Leech chose the perfect illustration to include the factories in since Ignorance and Want already point out Britain’s apathic social attitudes towards the poor, and therefore, by placing the factories in the background of this image, Leech assists the reader in making the connection between the unethical working conditions of the factories and the young children who were employed in them. Furthermore, the image further highlights the cultural issue of child labour by following the text’s description of the children. The children are described as “meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish” in the text, and Leech is able to illustrate such description with his art style of realism in which the children do in fact look unhuman, and animalistic or “wolfish” for that matter. Therefore, Leech is able to both subvert the text with his interpectoral narratology (including factories in the background even though they were not mentioned in the text) while also respecting the text’s authority in his portrayal of the two children by closely following Dickens’ description of the children. In essence, Leech’s subversion of the text does not challenge the authority of Dickens, it rather adds to Dickens’ own concern with how the working class and their children were being treated.

Principle Sources: 

http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/carol/6.html

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/hist8.html

https://studio.covecollective.org/anthologies/eng910-victorian-illustrat...

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Layers

Timeline of Events Associated with John Leech "Ignorance and Want" A Christmas Carol (1843)

The New Poor Law of 1834

14 Aug 1834

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, nicknamed the ‘New’ Poor Law, established the workhouse organization. Before this law, resources such as parish poorhouses and almshouses were available to starving families and those living on the streets. These places provided food, clothing, blankets, and even occasional cash to those in need of it. However, with the ‘New’ Poor Law, these establishments were closed down, and in its place was the workhouse. The workhouse was a system of intense, back-breaking labor of the poor in exchange for meagre food and shelter. To labor in the workhouse, the poor had to live there. This rule was highly distressing to the poor because it forced families to abandon many of their belongings, their homes, and even each other as the workhouses separated people by age and gender.

Dickens himself never lived in a workhouse, but it was discovered after his death, that his family had been imprisoned in a debtors’ prison. As restricting and miserable as a debtors’ prison was, Dickens believed it was superior to the conditions of a workhouse. At least in the debtors’ prison, young Dickens and his family could stay together.

Although he didn’t experience living in a workhouse, Dickens was a reporter for a time during the Poor Law. As such, he witnessed the hardships brought upon by the workhouse. He was a witness to young children being separated from their families and forced to perform extensive labor beyond their years. He got a sense of what it meant for poor people to be desperate, blamed, starving, and mistreated. Additionally, Dickens observed how these workhouses were run by heartless men who didn’t care about the inhumane conditions of their workhouse or the suffering of their laborers.

One of these figures of the “heartless men” shows up in Oliver Twist as the man in the white waistcoat. This character represents the arrogant, uncaring officials of the workhouses who were prejudiced against the poor. During this time, they thought of the poor as lowly beggars who were to blame for their circumstances. This hypocritical idea is shown multiple times in Oliver Twist as the higher-ups preach to the poor to change their ways, yet don’t provide them with a sufficient way to do so.

One character that portrays this self-righteousness of the higher-up is Mr. Bumble. Mr. Bumble takes great pride in hurting and abusing the children of the workhouse. With Oliver, specifically, Mr. Bumble never believes Oliver is telling the truth and believes Oliver is an inherently bad child. If people like Mr. Bumble believe that children like Oliver are fundamentally evil, how do they expect children and the poor to better themselves as they often preach them to do?

To sum, as we examine the ‘New’ Poor Law and Dickens’ own observations of the act, we’re able to see the hypocrisy and prejudice of the upper and middle classes towards the poor and why Dickens was so passionate about this subject. Officials like Mr. Bumble preach Christian morality, and yet, are merciless towards the workhouse laborers. This was one of the main points that Dickens gets across to readers of his novel. He highlights the institutional cruelty of the workhouse officials through satirizing characters like Mr. Bumble to show how the Poor Act was highly detrimental to people of the lower class while drawing from his own experiences as a child and reporter to make his novel personal.

Richardson, Ruth. “Oliver Twist and the Workhouse.” The British Library, The British Library,

18 Feb. 2014, www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/oliver-twist-and-the-workhouse.

 

 

 

The New Poor Law of 1834

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