Dickens’s Britain is still with us

The two-child benefit cap would have punished Tiny Tim.

The New Statesman staff are sometimes drawn to the windows of our first-floor office in Hatton Garden by events unfolding outside: a purple Lamborghini pulling up to the jeweller’s next door, a music video being filmed on phones in the middle of the road, groups of men striking deals or squaring up to each other while security guards coolly observe. I’m always aware, though, that what we’re looking at are Dickens’s streets.

Here are the ghosts of Victorian inequality: slumlands full of crime and punishment. A few doors down is the magistrates’ court where Oliver Twist is brought and accused of picking pockets; a couple of streets east is the “wretched place” where Fagin has his den, and the “low public-house, in the filthiest part of Little Saffron Hill” frequented by Bill Sikes.

Poverty in Britain is regularly described as Victorian or Dickensian – it has become unthinking shorthand, in the way state bureaucracy is reliably Kafkaesque and tech innovations are Orwellian. And yet, the comparison feels increasingly less hyperbolic. Revisiting A Christmas Carol last December – yes, all right, the Muppets version, but it’s a family tradition, and besides the screenplay is remarkably faithful – it seemed to me that Dickens’s world and our own seem to be drawing closer. The financial precariousness of the Cratchits could be described as “in-work poverty”: Bob’s wages as Ebenezer Scrooge’s clerk are barely sufficient to keep his family afloat. Today 72 per cent of children in poverty live in a household where someone is in work. The benefits-slashing New Poor Law of 1834 – detested by Dickens – was informed by a Malthusian approach to what Scrooge calls the “surplus population”: generous hand-outs, it was felt, would only encourage working-class families to have more children. It’s hard not to hear an echo of such thinking in the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, so far upheld by Labour: an immoral policy that punishes children from birth. And yes, that would include Tiny Tim.

Three in ten children in the UK today are living below the poverty line, an appalling statistic that is at the heart of this special issue of the New Statesman guest edited by Gordon Brown. Dickens’s work still speaks to us because of his genius, but his Britain should feel like history. It’s to our shame that it does not.

Dickens is well read in today’s schools: that sounds like something to celebrate, part of the legacy of Michael Gove’s education reforms, which we seem to have collectively decided were a Very Good Thing. But speaking to English teachers while looking around secondary schools for my daughter, I was struck by how narrow the curriculum has become. The tables were heaving with copies of A Christmas Carol, Macbeth and An Inspector Calls but contemporary fiction was practically non-existent. When exam boards add more adventurous and modern texts, schools – without the funds to buy new books, or the time to create new teaching resources – tend to stick to what they know. Given the golden age of writing for children and young adults we have been living through in the last 30 years – from Philip Pullman to Malorie Blackman, Katherine Rundell to Alex Wheatle – this is profoundly depressing. The number of students taking English literature at university is falling rapidly, as is the proportion of school pupils who say they read for pleasure. Our system is prioritising exam proficiency and the dubious concept of “cultural capital” above a love of reading. I would like to say that Dickens, whose concerns were contemporary and whose instincts were unfailingly popular, would not approve – but actually I expect any arrangement that kept him in the bestseller lists would have suited him fine.

This is my last issue of the New Statesman before leaving for pastures new: Tom McTague, the new editor-in-chief, launches his first edition on 13 June. I have been acting editor for the past five months, but part of the team for 11 years. Throughout, I have tried to be an evangelist for the back half of the magazine: the writing on books, culture and the “rest of life”. There is a fallacy (not helped by our education system) that the arts are “soft”. They are, of course, nothing of the sort: even when not overtly political, art is a lens that brings the political world into focus. It also makes us better humans. The novelist Eimear McBride describes her theatre training as teaching her to employ “a kind of radical empathy”. That is what good art can do (just ask Dickens) – and it is something our politics is in desperate need of.

In my time at the NS my colleagues and I have worked with guest editors including Grayson Perry (who scrawled: “Cars and watches: not messy like feelings!” on his men’s-mag parody cover), Michael Sheen (whose Covid-era catch-up calls included revelations about Tony Blair’s Union Jack boxer shorts) and Greta Thunberg (who joined our first video call while striding through Stockholm pushing a broken bike). Gordon Brown (whose moral conviction and preacher’s-son past is evident in every interaction) is the only person to have guest edited twice: we collaborated on an issue in June 2016 titled “Britain in Europe”, just before Britain decided Europe was where it didn’t want to be. We may have lost that argument but we must not lose this one. On child poverty the case is as clear as the stakes are high.