Mr. Tangle

I will not be posting my usual witty and ever hilarious blog this week. I have failed my audience!
But I would like to note MR TANGLE. oh sly Dickens. you punny punny man. (scheduling conflicts has lead to my absence) I will come back strong next week!

Narrative Voice in Mary Barton, Bleak House, and "Man of the Crowd"

I am deeply perplexed by Edgar Allen Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” in relation to the texts we have been reading. In particular, I am interested in the ways that Poe’s story speaks to how we read stories such as Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Dickens’ Bleak House, and how to interpret the narrative voice in both of these texts. Both Mary Barton and Bleak House are stories told by more than one narrator; one narrator is third person omniscient while the other is a first person narration. My instinct after having read and discussed Mary Barton was to understand these narrative decisions as a rhetorical way of inviting the reader in, to not merely be a passive viewer or passerby, but to try and understand these characters and their lives so they become more than a faceless mass of people. I felt the same reflex while reading Bleak House. We begin with a third person narration, and then move into Esther’s personal narrative voice in Chapter Three, a voice that she herself admits may not be “clever,” but her humility invites the reader in. She admits that she may not be “quick,” but she “had always rather a noticing way—a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to understand it better” (Dickens 28). I immediately thought of the way that Gaskell invites the reader into the city, to understand all the characters and their complexities, and to sympathize, to not only witness the events of the story unfold, but to identify and relate in some way. I felt that Esther was setting me up to read Bleak House in a similar way.

Imagine my confusion after reading Poe’s “Man of the Crowd.” I initially felt that Poe’s story was challenging the notion that an outsider can move in, and understand, and that the city and its dwellers will remain faceless and unknowable-- that this is what the city does to individuals. But, I decided to revisit the story because I was not satisfied with this conclusion. As I re-read the story, I realized that the narrator is not seeking to understand the stranger, and that his declarative sentence in the end, which is obnoxiously delivered out loud, is not a reflection of the stranger, but is instead a reflection of his own need to justify his inability to understand. Based on the narrator’s environment at the beginning of the story, it is obvious that the narrator is somewhat accustomed to leisure, and conveniently has the time to follow this stranger with whom he has become infatuated; the narrative has already established a sense of class hierarchy. He then proceeds to follow this man throughout the city, noting the people he passes and describing them based purely on their outward appearances. At the end of his pursuit, he has come no closer to understanding the stranger and neither has the reader, but instead of interacting with the stranger, the narrator surrenders and decides that the stranger is ultimately a reflection of the unknowable and undecipherable crowd. As a reader, I am less convinced. After having read Mary Barton, and taking into consideration Esther’s understanding of herself as a narrator, I am more apt to believe that the narrator in Poe’s story represents a kind of surface level understanding of texts, of people, that keep observers passive and at a distance, whereas Esther, Mary and John Barton, as well as Frederick Engels, are asking for a deeper more intimate interaction with texts, crowds, and individuals.

Walking in the City... and Getting Lost

After reading Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” chapter, I think I’ll structure my response around the parts I found interesting and least confusing.

            First, I found it interesting that the voyeur is distinguished from the walker. As the city is meant to be “read” as a text, the importance of seeing or perceiving is stressed. He says that the “desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it” (92). This signals that perceptions, ideas, and concepts are necessary to have before one can experience something. I think this is what he’s getting at as he begins talking about the connection between concept and practices.

            Second, as he mentions the discourse over “the city,” he notes: “Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate” (95). If the goal was to show with “rational transparency” from where these ruses and combinations of powers stem, I still feel at a loss. What I can make from this section is that the city as an idea has shifted into something that is beyond the control of what it was imagined or intended to be. In other words, the city has taken on a life of its own, with its own set of rules and practices.

            Third, I was not expecting a connection between pedestrians and the theory of a speech act. If I can think all the way back to 501, I remember that in J.L. Austin’s “How To Do Things With Words” to say something is to do something, a “performative.” A language system provides structure, but the individual can independently interpret and appropriate those “rules.” I understand that the pedestrian in the city can also appropriate the rules that the “topographical system” has created (97). I know this connection is central to understanding this chapter, but I’m still struggling with its significance. Is it highlighting the agency that a pedestrian possesses in a world (or city) that has been created for that pedestrian? Is it referring back to how the concept of the city has developed into more than just a conceptual idea? If so, what is that “more”?

The connections to rhetoric, figurative language, symbolism, etc. stress me out; however, I’d like to end with a comment on the close of the chapter. We even get taken to Freud in this chapter, but I guess that shouldn’t be so surprising. He says, “To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other” (110). Like so many other things, the city is a place or space from which the individual, or subject, can create an understanding of himself or herself. The city has the power to shape our selfhood and our understanding of it.

So, in all, these are the moments that struck me the most, mostly because I felt like I could speak on these points, accurately or not... I’m looking forward to our discussion on this tomorrow!

First paragraph, introduces us to secrets, to conscious rather than repressed acts that become “a burden so heavy in horror” that regardless of the possibility for absolution, forgiveness, or relief, cannot be divulged. Why? Because of shame (as self-same repulsion) and utter social repulsion it seems, since guilt or fear of an afterlife would compel someone with a conscience or with faith to tell and confess the un-nameable secret. “Thrown down only into the grave” sounds violent as an utter act of repulsion that which cannot be accepted even if it is done so only through denial (1). This denial, obstruction, or restriction opens Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”.  As a text that refuses to be read, it will take us, the reader, on a journey as both the follower and followed, leaving us all (follower, followed, and reader) as a stranger and wanderer that circuited a Penrose spiral to end where we began. But rather than a circular narrative, we are dropped at the gap of and ending that began with what first seemed to be an intelligible, and cohesive narrative. Through our willing and driven journey of reading, Poe has disrupted our expectations of coherence, moved rather as by compulsion.

The first paragraph enjambs into the next as we shift to what requires familiarity-for the narrator, and by implication for the reader. You know, that coffee house with the “large bow-window” the D-Coffee-House in London. Indeed, the contrasts that follow pain / pleasure, illness / good health, ennui / excitement resonate with our sensory, corporeal and psychic experiences. Yet, there is surely also a distancing. Intertextually, I associate ennui with Baudelaire and Le Fleurs du Mal (1857). Uncanny? Purposefully referenced somehow in the psyche of those who read certain genres? Eroticism? “With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself” subliminally playing to (with) the oral and phallic ears of our psyche concerned with the needs and desires of the body? But who has the privilege to just sit and watch, and to remain focused with one’s own pleasure and enjoyment? Definitely not a laborer. But that observation does not seem as central as the next, and that is, that we are not allowed to stay fixated on the Id. And so the narrator shifts from his personal narrative of ill health, pleasure, pain, and enjoyment to intellectualism.

Abstraction, to move away from pain and pleasure to the scientist categorizing and hierarchizing society seems familiar and the right course of action and thought. The masses of people, described within categories (even tribes), is told in a coherent and almost linear way. We move from the upper echelons of society to its most dispossessed. Distinctions continue. Types are differentiated. Dandies and military men. Women of all classes whose distinction is beauty contrasted against ladies of leisure trying to hold on to their looks, all of them too closely associated to prostitutes, except for the modest young girls. These seem more like victims, tearful when they should be indignant of their use and abuse.

And so “with a brow to the glass” the scientist / anthropologist continues. And when the narrator takes us, makes us follow him and the stranger, it is rationalized as such. He is driven by history but also by his inability to fully read or place the old man. Thus, he is driven by the appearance of a seemingly new sign. But instead of driven or compelled, or impelled (by the sign itself), the narrator wants us to believe as he seemingly does that he has made a choice, a “resolve” to follow this discovery and to thus know the meaning of this “other”. But the other can never be fully known, integrated, absorbed, disclosed, possessed, or resolved. This other might as well be “death” for as close as we come to it, it will always remain an unknown for to know it means our dying. And yet, is an individual consciousness truly individual or truly ours or just mine?

Gosh, I enjoyed this story. Yes, it tickled me and made me utter a few “Ah’s” and “Oh’s”. Afterall, the seeker remains estranged to the stranger, and yet, this stranger does not give up because in essence, as long as he is among the crowds, searching for the crowd, he is not alone but among all others.

But what about us, the reader? At the end, I understood that the city was a text itself, and that it had just played (with) me and my desire for the familiar and to make coherence. Having said that, I was pleased to then read Michel de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life” since it fit perfectly with Poe’s short story.  

 

Similarities Between Bleak House and The Man of the Crowd

Poe begins his narrative by introducing us to a variety of city dwellers from the upper class gentry to town drunks. He is the detective like observer taking note of every detail of a person’s attire, expression and character. Structurally Bleak house functions in the same way. As the cast is introduced we are taken into the High Court at Chancery where we are once more introduced to the business men and clerks old and young, gentlemen and pick pockets as described by Poe. As we get a closer look at the cast of characters we can see that Mr. Skimpole is the pickpocket in form of the “dandy” and Mr. Boythorn might just be the “sharper” in the form of the military man, if we go by his booming voice. We even see the “drunk” at Mrs. Jellybee’s house in the form of the cook. But why do both authors take so much care in describing these classes with so much unflattering detail? Is it to highlight their poverty, their desperation or their shrewd and false criminality? In Poe’s introduction of people he observes them with skepticism by describing them as “professional beggars” who scowl at those in need of charity. He describes the young clerks as “facsimiles of the gentry”, everywhere he looks there is a copy or imitation of the upper classes. He even expresses disbelief in that gentlemen actually confuse these people as one of their own sometimes. Dicken’s does the same in his narrative by making people pleasant to the cast of characters but with the underlying disquietude of incertitude about the given character. Our most obvious examples are Mr. Skimpole, whose name alone suggests that he “skimps” out on his children and mooches off of his friends. There is always the underlying current of suspicion held by the reader when introduced to new characters. Mrs. Jellybee for all her proclamations of doing good in Africa does not succeed in convincing the reader of this “truth.” Another similar character is Mrs. Padriggle. I do not have the answer to the question of  why these characters are represented in this light, but it seems to me that the narrators report from a privileged point of view. Poe’s narrator is an outsider, casting judgments and in someway Dickens’ two narrators do so as well. Are the authors projecting the views of the upper classes on those who dare to dream of rising above their stations one day. Is it to express the disgust that one will feel at entering into the lives of the poor in order to create an awareness of their situation?

            Another point of interest to me was the narrator in both stories. Poe’s voyeuristic narrator seemed in some ways to be the “Man of the Crowd” himself. The entire narrative the narrator functions as a shadow to this mysterious man, able to be in tune with his body language and facial expression from behind. Their illnesses are almost the same, unknown but drive them to move about the city. It is almost as if the man is narrating for the audience from an out of body experience if one looks a from a psychoanalytic point of view. It is eerie. The same can be said about the alternation of narrator in Bleak House, like a split personality coming to life at night while the real person sleeps. The third person narrator disappears when Esther enters the scene but reappears when Esther is gone to bed and vanishes once more when she awakens to resume her narrative. Once again why have the authors chosen to tell their stories in this bizarre manner?

Dickensian Satire

Though only in the early stages of Dickens’ Bleak House, I’m already intrigued with the author’s use of biting satire in his characters, particularly Mr. Skimpole.

Skimpole is the obvious fool of this section. He is often referred to as a “child” by the master of the house, Mr. Jarndyce, and though he exhibits the characteristics of a genuine loafer, his most salient attribute, his cavalier nature is consistently ignored and even accepted among the inhabitants of Bleak House. Although his light-hearted speech regarding the ways of bees in chapter eight is meant to be a humorous representation of his character’s overall personality, Skimpole’s ignorance is more so revealed in the narrative. Dickens uses the bee metaphor to describe the efforts of the working class, paralleling the nature and purpose of the insect to its pitiful human counterpart. The narrator says, “He [Skimpole] didn’t at all see why the busy Bee should be proposed as a model to him; he supposed the Bee liked to make honey, or he wouldn’t do it – nobody asked him.” Skimpole then goes on to describe the bees as “egotistical,” as its work seems to grow in value only upon recognition; furthermore, he states that this type of motivation proves unsupportable, and that one would have a “very mean opinion of the Manchester man if he spun cotton for no other purpose” than the positive attention he might receive.

The speech, delivered in a fanciful, blithe manner certainly highlights Skimpole’s whimsical character. However, it also exposes an obvious bias he has against the working man. While he credits the drones for living a life free of work and responsibility, he condemns the bees for producing honey and doing so in such a way that garners attention. Here, the reader sees Skimpole’s complete ignorance of not only the natural existence of bees, but the social conditions of the working man. Bees, like the human workers, produce only for the profit and well-being of a higher power; the former, of course, provides for the queen bee and her entire hive while the humans work in suffering conditions to support factory owners and commercial endeavors. Similarly, the bees and humans are never fairly compensated for their work, since bees are solely responsible for the continuous support of a hive’s ecosystem, rarely receiving any sort of benefit at all. The same can be said about the working class. Their own civil freedoms are sacrificed for the well-being of the bourgeois factory heads.

Dickens’s satire is clear here, using Skimpole as a way to expose the uninformed and prejudiced thinking of the upper class. I’m interested to continue reading more of the author’s satirical arguments throughout the novel. More so, I’m curious to learn about Dickens himself to see if these satirical sketches are merely archetypal characterizations of ridiculous thinking and behavior, or if he really is infusing the text with personal sentiments. 

Imagined and Remembered: Inventing Cities

           Michel de Certeau’s Spatial Practices section Walking in the City evoked so many emotions from me, specifically because 1) I couldn't understand shit 2) when I did understand pieces I felt love for language 3) I thought he was ridiculous with his examples 4) I loved how one of his examples used language as a metaphor for being a pedestrian in the city and 5) I couldn't understand shit. 
            As people experience cities, and as they "name" and label their experiences, they create the city. What interests me are the subjective perspectives of each "name," so the city then, is created by metaphors. There is no "original" or "authentic" city. de Certeau states that the "concept of the city is decaying" but really, it is just an imagined or remembered concept in the first place.

          I connect this with the “names [which] make themselves available to the diverse meanings, given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting points on itineraries which, as metaphors they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by”(104). I connected this with my grandfather's memories of being a youth in Los Angeles, and my students' imagined experiences of their Euro trip adventures.

            To begin, de Certeau made me aware of our “memories” of each place we experience, before occupying the space presently . This idea is reminiscent of how lovers, when they meet in their 20s never see the aging 80 year old in front of them, but still see their loved one as the 20 year old they fell in love with. I can’t see West Adams the way my grandfather does, when he rode the trolley down Olympic to dance at the Biltmore in downtown. I can’t “see” the city with trolleys, I see Verizon, Rite Aid and Ross stores. In this example, my grandfather’s meaning of “Los Angeles” is an “imagined” city to me, however, very recognizable to him, as he sees the buildings that have replaced his own “original value” of the city.

            de Certeau  also brought up these same “fictional” cities that tourists invent before they are in the spaces. I brought high school graduating Seniors to Europe for eight consecutive summers. When choosing where they wanted to visit on their six city trip, they had “ideas” of places that they wanted to experience. It was not St. Paul’s Cathedral that they wanted, nor Versailles, nor the Coliseum which connects with Malaparte stating  “The place de la Concorde does not exist,”...“it is an idea.” These young walking visionaries wanted not to “see” the city, but “experience” it by eating at the restaurants, dancing at the clubs and spending money at the Parisian H&M. They had fictionalized London, Paris and Rome, and they had their experience prior to getting on the airplane, so that when actually occupying that foreign space, their fictional perceived planned expectation of the city polluted the true “city”;  they did not let the authentic “city” as it’s own space, unfold before them.

            What I have, hopefully, prepared is an understanding that the subjective “superstitions” of stories and legends of the inhabitants with past experiences of the space they occupied, and a tourists’ imagined “dreamed-of places” both show how the present space of the city cannot be “seen” by the local, nor the tourist. These liberated spaces become occupied by the “meaning” which people give to them.

            By declaring that all cities are imagined spaces, allows me to view Prague, Paris, Los Angeles and Amsterdam by my imagination, not by the reality of the place.

            So, what then differentiates the cities? Language, botany, weather, earth surface and also movement of the city all create a “feeling” of the individual “city” but, again, that feeling becomes subjective. The culture of each city and the symbiotic nature of all of the residences make up a “character” and that takes on a life of it’s own. Ever evolving to match the “make up” of the character, and ever changing to match the economy, these cities although are differentiated to a objective lens, the subjective “experienced” observer cannot see, as a fish cannot see water. They exist in the fiction that the observer has imagined the city to encompass. 

           de Certeau states that “the concept-city is decaying”, but I say the “city” hasn’t decayed, it has just metamorphosed into a fictionalized synecdoche of our imagined spaces and of our memories.

How the Dickens Should I Read Dickens?

According to the lecture notes of Vladimir Nabokov, who taught European literature at Wellesley and Stanford during the 1950s, many of the social conditions depicted in Bleak House date back to the 1820s and 1830s, and had already been reformed by 1852 when the novel was published. But Nabokov overstates his case. Although parliament passed the Legal Reform Act in 1852, it wasn’t until the legal act of 1875 that the country’s judicial system was truly modernized. And the first Public Health Act of 1848 was not properly carried out in the municipalities until twenty years later. Nevertheless, these nominal pieces of legislation furnish Nabokov with a convenient opportunity to rail against scholars who read literary works for their sociological or political impact. Such readers, Nabokov scoffs, are “immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature” (64) and will never experience the “telltale tingle between the shoulder blades,” for to Nabokov the only way to read literature is “with your back” (70). Thus he counsels us to disregard the anachronisms of Dickens’ novel and celebrate its structure, style, imagery, and “verbal magic” (70).

Nabokov’s sentiments capture the sin qua non of the New Criticism, which was in vogue during the period that he wrote. As rulers of the roost in college English departments, the New Critics had little patience for scholars whose methods foregrounded a leveling approach to literature. But the hermeneutic winds would soon whisk the New Critics away and replace them with Post-Structuralists, Deconstructionists, and New Historicists, among others. The New Historicists pose a particularly interesting challenge to Nabokov’s aesthetics. By maintaining that historical literary texts can function as events, and the converse argument that the influence of historical events can be traced to literary texts, New Historicism privileges an expanded agency for literature as a social force. Thus Jerome McGann argues that readings displaced from their contemporaneous external significance do not even qualify as “critical operations” (McGann’s emphasis). “Rather,” he asserts, “they are vehicles for recapitulating and objectifying the reader's particular ideological commitments” (54-55).

McGann’s stinging rebuke to Nabokov’s stinging assertion deconstructs one of my most treasured moments as an undergraduate. It should come as no surprise to you that I went to college during the heyday of the New Criticism. In an English lit survey course I took, the instructor had just given his interpretation of an Old English poem, the title of which I have long forgotten. I raised my hand and gave a different interpretation. “Why, I never thought of that!” he replied. I was beaming. Okay, he was only a TA but he was smart. I guess if I were smart I’d remember the name of that poem and then determine its contemporaneous external significance.

But McGann also says something else not as controversial but truly memorable. The benefit of the great works, he suggests, is that they present us with ideological perspectives different from our own. This is why we “who are different, can learn from them.” It seems to me that even the “purest” of readers would agree with McGann, with the possible exception of a certain Russian author/critic.

Works Cited 

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. 

McGann, Jerome. "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner." 

Some 510 Notes

The following is essentially a copy of the email message sent to campus addresses, without the embarrassing typos of course but probably with some new ones.
 
A couple of points as we head into the weekend.

First, don't be alarmed if your panicked emails about papers goes unanswered for a couple of days. I will be away and while I will be checking email I probably won't be able to respond very fully.

Second, in light of that I thought it might make sense to offer you a slight extension on the deadline. Those writing a paper can of course hand it in next class meeting, but you can also hand it in as late as Friday, November 1. If you choose to take advantage of the extension, please get your paper in my department mailbox by no later than 3pm on Friday, November 1.

Third, I should have mentioned something about the difficulty of the chapter from de Certeau's book. French theory, you know, both working from a foundation of Foucault and working against him as well. Those of you with some theory background might find this warning insulting. Please accept my apologies and pick up your monocle. Those without much background in theory will find swaths of it indecipherable. (I find parts of it indecipherable and I'm a famous smart guy.)

There, another brilliant five-paragraph essay. Enjoy Bleak House and the romantic side of everyday things.

Wirth and Mary Barton

Louis Wirth’s “Urbanism as a Way of Life” made me think about the ways in which living in the city has affected our social life. It was also interesting to note the connections to our own time and also with Gaskell’s time. The first claim I found interesting was when Wirth said that you could still see the influence of the countryside in the city: “a mode of life reminiscent of this earlier form of existence persists” (3). The juxtaposition of an earlier time with an older time is something I kept thinking about while reading Mary Barton. There’s a great moment when Mary reminisces about the old times: “And then came a strange forgetfulness of the present, in thought of the long-past times…” (224). She reminisces about her mother primarily. I find that Mrs. Barton is such a strong symbol for the countryside. From the beginning of the novel, Barton and Wilson’s comments about Mary and Esther’s beauty sets them apart from the typical Manchester factory girls. The country sisters provide a beautiful contrast to the ugliness of city life. While Mrs. Barton dies early on, her symbolic “country-ness” continues on through her daughter. Through the daughter, we can see an “earlier form of existence” living on; although, I am admittedly still working out that train of thought.

                There were some moments that I came at odds with Wirth’s points, especially as I kept thinking of the characters in the novel. For example, Wirth states, “personal mutual acquaintanceship between inhabitants which ordinarily inheres in a neighborhood is lacking” (11). I see great models of acquaintanceship between old and young characters alike in the novel. The Barton and Wilson family have a great bond throughout the entire plot. Mary, being the younger character and most vulnerable to the changes in life that Wirth suggests, maintains a great friendship with Margaret. In that respect, I see some limitations to Wirth’s argument.

                  However, one point I did agree with in Wirth that lent itself to Gaskell’s characters is through the idea of the “segmentalization of human relationships” (12). Wirth explains that the contact people have with one another does not give them a “whole” view of each other. The limited contact people have with one another and the limited capacities in which people meet leaves them with a “less intensive knowledge” of one another (12). I find this idea fascinating and I couldn’t help but immediately think of Esther. Initially, she was such a grand character who evoked so much mystery and intrigue. Yet, when we find out what really happened to her, we quickly realize we didn’t know that much about her to begin with.

                Other points I made between Wirth and the novel had to deal with John Barton. Wirth notes that the “individual counts for little, but the voice of the representative is heard with a deference roughly proportional to the numbers for whom he speaks” (14). I couldn’t help but chuckle at the “deference” with which John was treated. Also, the change in John’s character throughout the novel closely fits Wirth’s description that “frequent close physical contact, coupled with great social distance, accentuates the reserve of unattached individuals toward one another and, unless compensated for by other opportunities for response, gives rise to loneliness” (16). As I usually find this to be true with any representation of father/daughter relationships, I found it heartbreaking to see John change with Mary and his overall demise, being such the strong character that he was.  

Thoughts on Carlyle

Carlyle’s statements regarding Chartism and Democracy are very controversial and in some ways contradictory. His stance is neither for or against the working classes. He in one moment warns the Aristocracy not to ignore the cry of the Working classes because “When the thoughts of a people, in the great mass of it, have grown mad, the combined issue of that people's workings will be a madness, an incoherency and ruin! Sanity will have to be recovered for the general mass”(1). He fans the flames of fear in the hearts of the Aristocracy by alluding to the revolutions occurring in France and Prussia among other European countries. He was correct in addressing these fears because the Chartist movement in some ways was the Revolution that never was in England. The demands of the Charter were not unlike the demands made by the French working classes. They wanted to be heard, they wanted to be represented in the government equally, they wanted the right to elect those representatives themselves, Carlyle warns that if these things are not acknowledged then the madness and ruinous incoherency of France would happen in England once more. It had already happened in 1642 when Cromwell ordered the execution of Charles I of England. But while he warns the Aristocracy to watch out, he also warns the working classes about the failure of Democracy.

             Democracy he warns is not always what one wants it to be. It is a warning to be careful of what one wishes for. Cromwell for instance came to power and became not King but the “Lord Protector of England” on refusing the offer of the crown. In many ways however, he was a “despot” with the republic he had helped to form, in effect being just like the king that he had tried in court. Robespierre in France did the same thing in 1793 at the outset of the Revolution, he executed the King in favor of a new Republic and ended up being assassinated himself for becoming the “despot” that Carlyle warns any leader elected for Democracy will eventually become because it is the nature of the institution. It is reminder to the working classes that they do not want the madness and incoherency of France. He once more fans the flame of fear into the hearts of men bu this time into the working classes.

            The solution according to Carlyle is not revolution against the aristocracy nor blatant disregard for the needs of the working classes. For Carlyle it is as simple as the relationship between a student and a teacher, or a subject to his King. It is the old way of things when those in power took care of their tenant farmers or parish dwellers and they in turn were loyal and subordinate to their masters. He is calling England back to the past before machines and industry. He asserts that the poor would willingly honor and house their “best” in palaces and fancy clothes if they truly conducted themselves as the worthy best of the nation and not just look it. In a nation where duty and honor are seen as necessary to the English Gentlemen’s character this is no small rebuke; but it is misleading. The poor would honor their best however, under the circumstances probably not in palaces. The poor were truly poor. Government seemed to be only interested in the upper classes and every legislation that passed was in some way a protective measure in favor of the wealthy. Food prices continued to climb in an age when food harvests were failing. Inflated food prices were preventing the poor from having access to what foods were available to them and even those were third rate picks. Starvation was not an exaggeration it was reality, a reality that the Aristocracy refused to acknowledge or alleviate. The Aristocracy as Carlyle assert would have no fear of being wiped out the way it was in France if they would only do their honorable duty and focus on the issue of England not the issues abroad or the Paltry “bedchamber” crisis that brought down the government in 1839. He asserts that the more pressing issue to be addressed was not which lady served in the Queen’s chamber but how poverty would be alleviated. England’s situation is not unlike the United States in this 21^st century. The middle class is slowly being eliminated, government believes like theirs did then that it has no business regulating or interfering in the people’s lives, Government shut downs do not happen because there is demand for Healthcare but on the contrary government shut down because it believes that the government cannot afford the health care and does not believe it should interfere in peoples lives. England’s government was the same. Chartism then is like Occupy now; they were movements formed by the 99% against the 1% elite that failed for lack of focus and leadership, undermined by their forcible and peaceable factions. Carlyle did have a point in saying that the solution is not in revolution because much is lost in the “gap” between the old and new forms of government. The solution is for both sides to acknowledge each other and truly reform. Changing times require adjustments. The upper classes must look down and see real people in the lower classes not just “Cash” in positive or negative money values. The lower classes in turn must not degenerate into a mad mob of incoherent, regicidal revolutionaries.