Victorian Visual Culture

While reading Bleak House, I was struck by the novel’s fixation on specific aspects of Esther’s illness (coded as smallpox). There are moments in the text where characters seem to fixate on how the illness has changed Esther’s appearance, and Jo later reveals how desperately guilty he feels for having gotten Esther sick. I also got a strong resounding sense from the text that the class differences between Esther and Jo seem to amplify the feelings of guilt and/or shame on Jo’s part (ex: the confrontation scene in Tom-All-Alone’s between Jo and Jenny in “Stop Him!”). Needless to say, there’s a weird interaction happening between class and illness within the novel. 

I realized I didn’t know a ton about smallpox in general, and particularly little about smallpox in Victorian England, so I set out to do a little bit of reading on the subject. The method of vaccination then was much more invasive than current vaccines. Doctors would lance patients’ arms and literally put material from the sores of those infected with cowpox in the wounds. Then, a few days later, the newly infected patient would come back and have the cowpox pustules drained, creating the immunization material for the next patient. This was VERY off-putting for some people, and led to discourse about the safety of vaccines. There were fears that mass vaccination could lead to the spread of other illnesses between those vaccinated, both physical and mental. People also had a lot of gripes with the actual contents of the vaccine, thinking that it was “Unchristian” that the smallpox vaccine originated from the contraction of a disease originating in a non-human species. 

Interestingly, in 1853 (right around the time the second half of Bleak House was being written), there was a fairly strong anti-vaccination movement amongst (predominantly) the British working class. Compulsory vaccination for infants was first introduced in England in the 1850s, but there had been legal and social projects in previous years focused on increasing vaccination rates within working class communities, so vaccination became a heavily classed and stigmatized phenomenon. Since the vaccination process involved actually being infected with cowpox, some vaccinated patients would feel very ill or even die from the exposure to the vaccine. 

Obviously, we are not free from these problems and the resistance towards beneficial medical practices (like vaccines) today. There are a lot of similarities between present day anti-vaccination movements and the movements in Victorian England. Considering the class elements surrounding smallpox in Bleak House, and the overlap between the novel’s serialization with the rise of working-class anti-vaccination movements, I can’t help but wonder whether or not Dickens tried to slip a voice for pro-vaccination with his depiction of smallpox’s impact on the story. 

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles, et al. Bleak House. Penguin Books, 2011. 

Durbach, Nadja. “They Might as Well Brand Us”: Working-Class Resistance to Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England.” Social History of Medicine, vol. 13, no. 1, Apr. 2000, pp. 45–62. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/13.1.45.

Fitzpatrick, Michael. “The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, The Royal Society of Medicine, Aug. 2005, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1181850/. 

Watson, Greig. “The Anti-Vaccination Movement That Gripped Victorian England.” BBC News, BBC, 28 Dec. 2019, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991.