Chapter Summary: Hatred and Civility

In Christopher Lane’s Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England, he tackles the issue of complex behaviors within the Victorian time period. He goes far into a deep psychoanalytical reading of the time period, especially with the literature. Studying Charles Dickens, he focuses on the issues that Dickens himself seemed to push as front-running social problems. In Lane’s chapter Dickensian Malefactors, we get a closer look on the different types of characters that helped show these social problems through their action.
Under his first heading of The Villain vs. The Recluse, we are given examples of the antiheroism aspect that Dickens pushed in many of his novels. Lane claims that he uses the antihero because it “compels us to view suffering as a form of anguish for which there may be no meaningful answer or solution”(60). In other words, Dickens wanted the public to see this suffering as something that couldn’t be fixed so easily. This idea is expanded when we are shown that these villains of his novels are used to show the social satires of the time. His characters had no redeemable qualities, unexplained hatred, and inability in sharing the world with others. There are many characters throughout Dickens novels that have these qualities, all to different degrees. These characters, the truly heartless ones, usually weren’t simply punished, but brutally murdered. This is an explanation to Dickens’s interest in the general publics interest of executions, where they would cheer at a death. The next section, The Family of Man, discusses Dickens’s satire of the North American’s obsession with money and indifference to poverty (64). He compares that to London, with its extremely dirty conditions. The lack of public safety standards is very apparent within the novels of Dickens, whether it’s a description of a disgust scene on the street or the rich turning the other way when confronted with it. His critique of the wealthy shows in many ways, but specifically the health of others and the entire city being affected was in the spotlight for him. Due to the harsh conditions, this led to an increase of those sketchy characters, living lives of crime and hate. One of his characters believed that his unjustly ways were provoked: “Bother against brother, child against parent, friends treading on the faces of friends, this is the social company by whom my way has been attended.”(70). The Victorian Age, although romanticized, actually seemed to have been a cruel, harsh, and deadly world. In another section, titled Dickens and Disaffection, Dickens compares two “evil” characters. Carton of Chuzzlewit and Drummle of Great Expectations, both are seen as bad eggs. Although Dickens sees both of these characters as past the point of redemption, Lane see that you can still separate the two, even with the similarities. He states “Carton’s misery opens a saving path to sympathy that Drummle’s torment disables, even voids (79). The chapter concludes with Dickens resounding bitter satire of the society that he lived in and loathed. He even shows this hatred of society through his characters realizing that society had made them turn into something other than “good’. Lane creates a strong case on Dickens ill feelings towards society and how it is represented throughout his novels through characters and their actions to descriptions of the conditions they lived in.