“Moving the World on a Child’s Heart”
Examining literary craftsmanship in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as responses to Victorian child labor
As Dickens eloquently wrote in A Christmas Carol, Christmas time is for “preserving a way of live that one knows and loves.” In this spirit I decided to unearth one of my undergraduate essays exploring the complexities of the Victorian world that Dickens and Browning experienced first-hand. Merry Christmas to each and every one of you.
Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them,
for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and author Charles Dickens crafted distinctive literary responses to the 1842 report on The Conditions of Child Labor in England with their respective “The Cry of the Children” and A Christmas Carol. The report offered insight for the people of England into the conditions of labor in the coal mines, particularly through affecting interviews with child laborers. Evidence of the impact this pamphlet had on Barrett Browning’s and Dickens’s artistic minds lies within the form, publication method, and tone of their individual works. Barrett Browning turns to sentimentality through the depiction of arduous suffering in her harrowing plea that instills an undeniable truth in the lines that comprise “The Cry of the Children,” while Dickens skillfully masks the churning cogs Barrett Browning illustrates by turning instead to humor and moral storytelling in A Christmas Carol, making it a digestible tale that carries a moral lesson withstanding the test of time.
Throughout Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” appears a unique rhythm aided by the use of a repetition that mimics the working conditions of factories and mines, presenting a sense of mechanical parts moving through the lines. This rhythm evokes sentimentality through its transparent harshness. Her use of repeated words—“for, all day, we drag our burden-tiring” (Line 72); “Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron” (Line 75); “For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning” (Line 77)—instills not only the droning of the laborious days these children are experiencing, but that these days will never cease except upon their death. The repetition of “all day” conveys a sense of eternity, an endless cycle of the same task, forever. The poem’s rhythm giving the impression of a machine is also found in her repeated use of the word “turning”: “Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling, / turns the long light that drops down the wall, / turns the black fires that crawl along the ceiling, / all are turning, all the way, and we with all” (Lines 81–84). Repeating the world “turning” instills the feeling of movement, as it could be interpreted as the generating of energy by the children’s small hands, and the word evokes a feeling of motion, a circular movement that the children have no choice but to move along with. The poem reaches the heart of the reader through accurate mechanical rhythm to illustrate the working conditions not just through descriptive language.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens chooses not to dwell upon the grueling machinery that Barrett Browning translates into “The Cry of the Children.” Instead, Dickens creates a miserly character to embody all well-off individuals who were likely profiting and indirectly contributing to child labor. When the aging Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, Marley warns Scrooge: “It is required of every man…that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death” (NA p. 720). The children Dickens would have read about in the report would not have been given the opportunity to go forth in life, and, according to his definition of the afterlife in A Christmas Carol as told by Marley, would be condemned to walk in death, never achieving peace. The purgatory faced by Dickens’s spirits is similar to that faced by the children in Barrett Browning’s poem: they cannot hope for death as they no longer can believe in the existence of God; in response to the poet’s suggestion that they pray, they respond: “Who is God that He should hear us, / While the rushing of the iron wheels is stirred?” (Lines 105–106). Even if they did pray, God would not hear their prayers above the sound of the mining equipment, making them just as helpless as the wandering souls in death written by Dickens.
One of the most striking moments in A Christmas Carol is Dickens’s decision to briefly lower the veil composed of magic and humor that is draped upon his characters to reveal what lies beneath: the true evils in a world that facilitates child labor. This moment comes when Scrooge encounters two children during his visit by the second of the three spirits, the Ghost of Christmas Present. Dickens describes these children: “where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them…where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked” (NA p. 750). The children’s appearance mirrors what is found in the report, as the description of a seven year old boy named Philip Phillips reads: “Was burnt by the fire-damp nine months since, and laid by five months, expected to die…the fire hurt me very badly; it took the skin from my face” (p. 41, British Library). When Scrooge asks the Ghost who these ghastly children are, the Ghost responds: “They are Man’s…and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. The boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want.” (NA p. 751). Unlike Barrett Browning’s voicing of the children’s cries, Dickens is making an appeal in this scene to the men and women who turn a blind eye to the children laboring in the coal mines and factories. He is providing such a harrowing description of the physical conditions of the children that, when he reveals their names, there is a greater emotional response. The “ignorance” after which the boy is named is the ignorance that would allow for children to be burned within an inch of their life as Philip Phillips was. “Want” represents the lack experienced by those subjected to meager lives by the compassionless people of power or means, such as Scrooge. Dickens writes the children to be “Man’s,” implying that they are the children of all mankind, children that must be loved and cared for, not placed in working conditions. Unlike “The Cry of the Children” that focuses absolutely on the children’s conditions, Dickens uses this scene as the most direct reference to not only the physical conditions of the children in the labor industry, but to the societal acceptance of what he believed to be criminally unjust.
While Barrett Browning and Dickens both have underlying messages in response to the working conditions of child laborers, Barrett Browning spoke directly to her peers in a plea for their action by publishing her poem in a magazine, while Dickens published his work as a book, something that could be read aloud as a family or shared between individuals. Barrett Browning begins her poem: “Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers” (Line 1), and while she later switches to voices of the children themselves, the message is for adults fortunate enough to not be in such miserable conditions. Barrett Browning’s sentimentality is particularly clear through this decision. In her opening line, she catches the attention of people who would be reading her poetry, likely educated men and women reading Blackwood’s Magazine. In the switch to giving the children a voice, she is substantiating their plight, revealing the grim realities to the audience she writes for, asking these men and women to consider what the lives of these children consist of. Dickens, on the other hand, made his text arguably more digestible by wrapping it within a metaphysical tale that would have been fashionable at the time with the rise in popularity surrounding Christmas celebrations. He writes to us, the reader, but the narrator of the story never suggests more than what is written on the page. In the conclusion of Scrooge’s tale, he finds happiness and contentment in generosity, and the narrator seems to wish every reader to experience such feelings: “May that be truly said of us, and all of us!” (NA p. 766).
Great Britain Commissioners for Inquiring into the Employment and Condition of Children in Mines and Manufactories. The Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Colliers of the United Kingdom Carefully Compiled from the Appendix to the First Report of the Commissioners With Copious Extracts from the Evidence, and Illustrative Engravings, 1842.
Held by the British Library
We were always assigned Dickens for Summer reading...to insure we didn't have too much fun. Often wondered if the Victorian penchant for gruesome poems and stories about children in peril were a response to infant and child mortality as well as life in general without antibiotics, where an infected paper cut could carry you away. Have read that in England (?) and elsewhere people didn't name their child (or perhaps not use their christening name) until the child was five because so many died before then. My parents, born 1913-1918 with only an undertone of irony and long before we could process sarcasm and irony, liked to say "children are to be seen and not heard" and recite Little Willie poems. [Willie in the best of sashes,
Fell in the fire and burned to ashes.
By and by the room grew chilly
Because no one wanted to poke up Willie.] Hard to tell if there was much of an adolescence back then as well. One went from a mouth to feed to part of the network that supported the family to by your twenties, eligible for high office like the founders of our country.