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Now, shabby people, God knows, may be found anywhere, and genteel people are not articles of greater scarcity out of London than in it; but this compound of the two — this shabby-gentility — is as purely local as the statue at Charing Cross, or the pump at Aldgate. It is worthy of remark, too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however poverty-stricken in appearance. A very poor man, "who has seen better days," as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty-slovenliness and wretched attempts at faded smartness.

We will endeavour to explain our conception of the term which forms the title of this paper. If you meet a man, lounging up Drury-Lane, or leaning with his back against a post in Long Acre, with his hands in the pockets of a pair of drab trousers plentifully besprinkled with grease-spots: the trousers made very full over the boots, and ornamented with two cords down the outside of each leg — wearing, also, what has been a brown coat with bright buttons, and a hat very much pinched up at the side, cocked over his right eye — don't pity him. He is not shabby-genteel. The "harmonic meetings" at some fourth-rate public-house, or the purlieus of a private theatre, are his chosen haunts; he entertains a rooted antipathy to any kind of work, and is on familiar terms with several pantomime men at the large houses. But, if you see hurrying along a by-street, keeping as close as he can to the area-railings, a man of about forty or fifty, clad in an old rusty suit of threadbare black cloth which shines with constant wear as if it had been bees-waxed — the trousers tightly strapped down, partly for the look of the thing and partly to keep his old shoes from slipping off at the heels, — if you observe, too, that his yellowish-white neckerchief is carefully pinned up, to conceal the tattered garment underneath, and that his hands are encased in the remains of an old pair of beaver gloves, you may set him down as a shabby-genteel man. A glance at that depressed face, and timorous air of conscious poverty, will make your heart ache — always supposing that you are neither a philosopher nor a political economist. — "Characters," Ch. 10, "Shabby-Genteel People," p. 123.

Commentary

As with The Prisoners' Van, Fred Barnard's social conscience and fascination with the down-and-out (whom he joined as an opium-smoker after his son's untimely death) are evident here. "Shabby-Genteel People," the tenth of the sketches in the "Characters" section, originally appeared as "Street Sketches No. 4" in The Morning Chronicle, 5 November 1834.

Walking purposefully past an area railing, the shabby-genteel gentleman with respectable tailcoat, gloves, top-hat, and cravat is oblivious to the genuinely poor but happy father and child on the pavement, both of whom are Barnard's inventions. "We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man" (124) betrays Dickens's personal anxieties about falling into poverty (as his father had fallen into the debtors' prison) from his tentative affluence as a young writer whose articles were the rage among middle-class periodical readers in the mid-1830s. He must have worried about what would become of him if he could not adapt his writing to the changing tastes of a fickle public. Certainly the sketch presents the spectre of genteel-poverty as very real to the twenty-year-old former law clerk and parliamentary reporter. "Better," Barnard seems to say," to be a genuinely poor member of the working class with no delusions and false aspirations to affluence and gentility." Not illustrated, unfortunately, is the shabby-genteel reader in the British Library's Reading Room whom Dickens must have observed on numerous occasions in the 1830s.

On reaching eighteen in 1830 he applied to the British Museum for a ticket to the Reading Room. Once again the Charltons proved helpful, and Mr. Charloton was his sponsor. The ticket was renewed at least four times and for several years he read in the Reading Room when he could. . . . .

Even in the Reading Room his eyes were not always on the books. One of his early descriptive pieces describes a fellow reader, a man in a threadbare suit with a steadily diminishing number of buttons. His shabbiness fascinated Dickens and when he disappeared for a week he assumed he had died. But he was wrong, and the man reappeared, looking different, in a bright back suit. Slowly Dickens realized it was the original suit, 'revived' by being painted over in glossy black paint. Soon the pale seams, knees and elbows reappeared, and a rainy day entirely removed the 'reviver'. Dickens leaves the story there. It is one of several pieces in which he gives a deadpan account of respectable failures and victims of London, lonely men who never rise to any success. Another is a clerk he sees in St. James's Park, who eats and lodges alone: 'Poor, harmless creatures such men are; contented but not happy; broken-spirited and humbled, they feel no pain but they never know pleasure.' The tone is dispassionate, but these men are emblematic warnings of what can easily happen to young men who fail to seize and make the most of their chances. — Claire Tomalin, "Becoming Boz 1827—1834," p. 41.

Harry Furniss's sketch of the shabby-genteel walker is not particularly distinguished in the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910).

A Shabby Genteel Story, William Makepeace Thackeray's final, unfinished novel (1857) by coincidence is set between 1835 and 1840, precisely the period in which Dickens was becoming a best-selling author with Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist, although it is apparently more overtly autobiographical in that it reflects how his own life was thrown into chaos by his wife's insanity in 1840. George Brandon, the protagonist of the fragmentary novel, is the shabby-genteel gentleman who has gone to the seaside resort of Margate in the off-season in order to hide from his London creditors. Although he becomes the subject of a plot involving his dysfunctional family, he shares with Dickens's pathetic figure the aspiration to appear respectable, even though he is in fact "shabby," wearing once-fashionable clothing that is falling apart.

Images of Poverty from the Cruikshank illustrations

Left: Cruikshank's view of the leisured working class, Meditations in Monmouth Street. Centre: Cruikshank's far less attractive Amazonian immigrant women about to engage in fisticuffs and hair-pulling in a crime-ridden ghetto, Seven Dials. Right: Cruikshank's description of a liminal place, where the middle-class struggle to maintain the minimum of their former lifestyle, The Pawnbroker's Shop.[Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Barnard's Contextualised Drawing of Another Shabby-Genteel, "The Poor Clerk" (1876)

Above: Fred Barnard's pathetic realisation of another "shabby-genteel" person, old before his time in St. James's Park, again contrasted with families and children, His spare pale face looking as if it were incapable of bearing the expression of curiosity or interest — in Characters, Chapter 1, "Thoughts about People," p. 104.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Bentley, Nicholas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens: Index. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z. The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. "Shabby-Genteel People," Chapter 10 in "Characters," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 202-204.

Dickens, Charles. "Shabby-Genteel People," Chapter 10 in "Characters," Christmas Books and Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875 [rpt. of 1867 Ticknor & Fields edition]. Pp. 370-73.

Dickens, Charles. "Shabby-Genteel People," Chapter 10 in "Characters," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp. 123-26.

Dickens, Charles. "Shabby-Genteel People," Chapter 10 in "Characters," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 250-54.

Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.

Schlicke, Paul. "Sketches by Boz." Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 530-535.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.

Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens, A Life. New York: Penguin, 2011.

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