As Britain celebrates the bicentenary of Charles Dickens, born 7 February 1812, his works have arguably never been more popular. Book sales are soaring, big-budget TV adaptations are drawing in millions of viewers, and specially themed exhibitions are being held in museums up and down the country. At the same time, it could also be argued, the central themes of his works have never seemed more relevant.
Driven by his own experiences of childhood poverty, the writer rallied against inequality, using his work to bring attention to what he regarded as some of the key social issues of his time: childhood poverty, rising inequality and high levels of unemployment. Given that these very same issues still dominate the news agenda in modern-day Britain, it’s only too tempting to speculate what Dickens would have made of London today. Is the city, heralded as the finance capital of the world, still home to children living in ‘Dickensian’ conditions on the margins of society?
Certainly, the situation has improved since the Hungry Forties, as the 1840s were known, when children were quite literally starving on the streets of London, or else living miserable lives in workhouses or as child prostitutes. As Alex Werner, curator of the Dickens and London exhibition at the Museum of London, notes: ‘Unemployment benefit, old age pension, a national health service and compulsory education for all children would seem to Dickens a great step forward from what he had experienced during his lifetime in the Victorian period.’ Nevertheless, he adds, “my guess is that Dickens would be surprised at today’s level of inequality.’
That Dickens would be surprised is, in itself, hardly surprising. In a year when London is to host the Olympics – at a reported cost of up to £24 billion ($38 billion) – and with a select few in the banking sector continuing be rewarded with substantial salaries and bonuses, levels of relative child poverty in England are worse than they are in every other developed country in Europe. Quite simply, even the briefest of looks at London in 2012 reveals a tale of two cities.
A socially segregated country
According to the Campaign to End Child Poverty (ECP), four in ten (or 650,000) London children now live in households where there is just £10 ($16) per person per day to cover everything, including utility bills. In Tower Hamlets, the local authority set to host the 2012 Games, 52 per cent of children live in poverty just a stone’s throw from the riches of the City, while in the borough of Islington, the figure stands at 43 per cent. Compare this to child poverty levels of just seven per cent and five per cent for the constituencies of Prime Minister David Cameron (Whitney) and his deputy Nick Clegg (Sheffield Hallam) respectively and the image you get is of a socially segregated country where children living in the capital are being disproportionately damaged by poverty and inequality.
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