You're Doing a Heck of a Job, Brownie

There’s a thread running from Carlyle to Dickens to Foucault that expresses their "bleak" views on charities and the people who staff them. In Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Carlyle carps about what he calls a “blind loquacious pruriency of indiscriminate Philanthropism” and “much self-laudation” that’s prevalent among the minority of the privileged citizens who even think about the poor. These practitioners try to cure poverty “by methods which can only make bad worse, and in the end render cure hopeless.” As for the charitable institutions themselves—those “universal sluggard-and-scoundrel protection-societies”—they are a “perpetual affliction.” Worse than the cholera fever, they are a “Benevolent-Platform Fever.”

In Bleak House (1852) Dickens puts a face on Carlyle’s rhetoric through the figures of Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle. He might have alternatively named them Mrs. Outside and Mrs. Inside, for the one invests her energies in foreign campaigns and the other in the domestic front. Mrs. Jellyby works to benefit the inhabitants of Borrioboola-Gha. Although we don’t know what she intends to accomplish in this African colony, her feverish letter-writing has consumed nearly all her time and enough stationary to fell half of Essex Forest. The only other tangible result of her efforts is the king’s decision to trade his people for rum. Mrs. Jellyby should have written his majesty a letter on the dangers of drinking alone.  

The utilitarianism that Carlyle despises is even more perfectly depicted in Mrs. Pardiggle. Taking advantage of her closer physical proximity to her area of operations, she “pounces upon the poor, and applies benevolence like a strait-waist-coat.” Judging from the catcalls she collects while making her rounds, her supposed beneficiaries agree with Carlyle. In fact, the main benefits appear to accrue herself. As she boasts to Esther, “The excitement does me good.” However, Esther sees through her from the getgo. As soon as they enter the brickmaker’s house, Esther notices her “business-like and systematic” style, and she later calls her work “charity by wholesale.” The only material thing that Pardiggle leaves in her wake, other than a dead baby or two, is a useless book that no one in the family can read even if they wanted to. .

Writing over a century after Carlyle and Dickens, in his chapter on panopticism Foucault discusses the charity organizations in Paris during the July Monarchy (1830-1848). We see the martial spirit portrayed in Dickens echoed in how the parishes divided the city into geographic units and then allocated their manpower accordingly. Like Mrs. Pardiggle, the organization members made household calls on individual families. But Foucault is less interested in what the charities gave out than in what they took in. They collected knowledge on such things as the "stability of lodging;  knowledge of prayers; attendance at sacraments; knowledge of a trade, morality; and  . . . [personal] behavior.” The information facilitated the extension of the monarch’s power, through the police “to the non-disciplinary spaces” beyond the reach of the “enclosed institutions” (workshops, armies, schools). It’s not clear to me just how this information was transferred from the parish organizations to the police. Were the charities a part of the government?

But based on things that Foucault says elsewhere, the mere of recognition of being observed has a controlling effect. Across the Channel, Mrs. Pardiggle's subjects know—and resent—that she observes them. What's more, the "exciting contest" she has with one of her peers shows that she not only gathers data but quantifies it. Is this one of Foucault's "infinite minute web of panoptic techniques"? I think for that to be true it would have to demonstrate some sort of extra-judicial power. What about George when he refuses a lawyer because he'd rather face the hangman than his fellow citizens believing that he got off by a clever legal maneuver? Maybe this shows how discipline extends to those gaps that the law doesn't reach. Gee, if I can think of enough of these examples to fill a seven-page paper, it will end my misery.