A couple of weeks ago I found myself strolling through Soho in London, at a respectable hour, behaving in an entirely respectable way.
I popped into the Coach and Horses on Greek St to pay homage to Peter O’Toole and Jeffrey Barnard, and on my way out passed through Dean St. Unusually maybe, my thoughts turned to Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. Marx lived at 28 Dean St (at the time the area was populated by doctors, architects, publishers and lawyers) and Dickens had worked in a theatre nearby (73 Dean St).
I wondered if they had ever met – there is no record of them having ever done so, though both had the same pre-occupation, the social and economic side-effects of the industrial revolution in Britain, especially the plight of those cast aside by the locomotive of what was then the world’s most powerful economy.
Manifesto
For example, Dickens’ book ‘A Christmas Carol’ published in 1843 was followed a few years later by Marx/Engels’ Communist Manifesto. There is evidence that in his own writing, Marx referred to some of Dickens’s work (and characters like Mr Pecksniff in Dickens’ 1842 book Martin Chuzzlewit, with Dickens later coining the term ‘pecksniffian’ to denote someone of high moral principles). Yet, even though their attention was grabbed by the same problems, Marx was an advocate of revolutionary solutions, and Dickens a fan of a more measured, benevolent approach.
If they were to meet today, I wonder what their collective passions might be fired by?
At the beginning of the ‘Manifesto’ Marx wrote ‘a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre’. What for example might that spectre be?
They might discuss how the two large communist countries have become authoritarian states and the ways in which they are weigh on and actively impinging on European democracy. Dickens would surely hold Marx to task for ‘how it all went so wrong’.
Marx might try to correct the error of communist ways by writing ‘A Democratic Manifesto’, abolishing the concentration of power in small groups, tight ownership of media and social media and much greater use of collective decision making. Dickens might plot the trials of naïve leaders (there are still a few judging by the courting of Viktor Orban) as they struggle to negotiate the obstacles put in their way by the former communists.
If poverty was the greatest obstacle of the mid 19th century, perhaps the biggest challenge in developed countries is from the ways in which, for the first time ever, technology is permitting enormous changes and variability in the ways we socialise, we think, are educated and the ways we look. Two of the stock market trends of 2023 – AI and obesity drugs – betray this.
Marx, who greatly valued the social aspect of human life, and who feared that capitalism might destroy society (not yet), might well take against the power of social media and soon AI firms. He might build up an impressive book of evidence – the ways in which social media leads to deteriorating sociability (apparently most couples now meet online, and there is a loneliness epidemic), societies appear more divided than ever, especially on questions of identity and values. It is also now possible to control and manipulate humans through technology than ever before.
For his part, Dickens might have difficulty writing about an atomised world, where people are so easy to take offense and where, despite material wealth, human development is regressing (Oliver Twist might choose an entirely different path – perhaps continuing life in a gang of scammers and David Copperfield would vault from poverty through the prism of TikTok).
If we needed proof of the prowess and relevance of either man, they are still part of public life. Marx remains prominent in the discourse in international political economy (David Skilling and I have coined the current business cycle as ‘Marx’s revenge’ because of the countervailing forces of capital and inflation) and this Christmas, various works of Dickens will appear on tv channels.
As a final recommendation, one of my favourite Dickens themed books ‘is ‘Drinking with Dickens’ , a set of yuletide drink recipes from the time of Dickens, authored by his great-grandson Cedric Dickens.