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Reading Victorian rags: Recycling, redemption, and Dickens's ragged children
Wynne, Deborah
Wynne, Deborah
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2014-12-24
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Abstract
In Victorian Britain rags were not only associated with the inadequate clothing of the poor, they were also viewed as a valuable commodity, widely collected for recycling into paper. This essay examines rags as simultaneously despised and precious objects, tracing the connections between Victorian accounts of poverty, the industrial recycling of rags into paper, and the redemption narratives created by Charles Dickens about rescued children. A supporter of Ragged Schools and champion of rags recycling, Dickens drew on the idea of the transformation of dirty rags into clean paper in his representations of ragged children. To him, the recycling of rags indicated the civilizing forces of modernity, and reading Dickens's representations of ragged children in this context reveals how cloth recycling became a paradigm for society's duties towards destitute children. This essay explains Dickens's juxtaposition of ragged children with references to rag-dealing in his novels; by this means he suggested that street children, like their ragged clothing, were capable of being purified and transformed into social usefulness.
Citation
Wynne, D. (2014). Reading Victorian rags: Recycling, redemption, and Dickens's ragged children. Journal of Victorian Culture, 20(1), 34–49
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Taylor & Francis
Journal
Journal of Victorian Culture
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DOI
10.1080/13555502.2014.991747
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Article
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en
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This is an Version of Record of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Victorian Culture on 24 December 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13555502.2014.991747 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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1355-5502
EISSN
1750-0133
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