The criticisms of society made by Thomas Hood in the poems he wrote in the years immediately prior to his death in 1845 are from a very particular stance. The poems specifically measure society against Christian values. Thus, Hood bewails how “Christian charity” should “hang your head” (“The Workhouse Clock” 63), or on its “rarity” (“The Bridge of Sighs” 43).The seamstress in “The Song of the Shirt” expresses disbelief that “this is Christian work” (16). The pauper in “A Pauper's Christmas Carol” muses over his treatment on “our Saviour's natal day” (2). The gin to which the beleaguered are driven is the “dram of Satan” and is drunk, “While Angels sorrow, and Demons grin” (“A Drop of Gin” 11, 72). In “The Lady's Dream” the neglectful attitude shown by society to its suffering members is damningly put alongside the Biblical reassurance that, “even the sparrow falls / Not unmarked of God” (“The Lady's Dream” 77–78). “The Lay of the Labourer,” as we shall see, also makes play with Scriptural references. In this Christian analysis of society's ills, the suffering and going wrong of society are the product of setting aside God's wisdom in the decrees He gives about how to organise human dealings.

This critique of society belongs to a very specific context. There were, of course, many other critics of contemporary social developments during this period. Gertrude Himmelfarb lists, for instance, some twenty groups who opposed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, ranging from Tories to trade unionists to temperance reformers (177). Similarly, Nicholas Edsall in his book about the anti-Poor Law movement in the years between 1834 and 1844 discusses how numerous separate bodies sprang up despite the absence of any “national anti-Poor Law organisation” (25). However, opposition to the Act was by no means universally made on moral, much less religious, grounds. Part of the opposition it stirred, for instance, concerned the centralisation of power the Act entailed. Thus, David Ashforth argues that “the great common denominator amongst opponents of the New Poor Law” was an “intense dislike of centralisation . . . the thought of being ruled by ‘three Big Wigs in London’”; this provoked opposition among “many who were otherwise prepared to accept the new system” (Ashforth 130).In religious circles, it was by no means the case that Hood's views would be generally endorsed. Prevailing religious social attitudes at the beginning of Victoria's reign have been summed up by Gerald Parsons:

With regard to the Poor Law Amendment Act, as Owen Chadwick points out, many of the clergy concurred with the view that under the old Poor Law immorality was promoted in that it encouraged idleness and bastardy (since it granted child allowance) (96). The new system established in the 1830s thus had Christian support: indeed, Bishop Blomfield of London and Bishop Sumner of Chester were members of the Poor Law Commission whose work paved the way for the New Poor Law (Chadwick 95). The prominent Scottish clergyman Thomas Chalmers, a Malthusian, having earlier supported the abolition of the Poor Laws altogether,Footnote ¹ was a keen advocate of the Amendment Act (Himmelfarb 174). The new Act was also welcomed warmly by publications such as the Evangelical Christian Observer and the Unitarian Monthly Repository (Chadwick 96). George Kitson-Clark remarks on “the commitment of a large number of the clergy to the administration of the Poor Law” once the reforms had been put into place (159).

An alternative religious view famously emerged with Christian Socialism in 1848. However, in the 1830s and earlier 1840s, a body of Christians with a decidedly more critical view of social issues already existed. Numerous Christians viewed the New Poor Law as “a violation of the Constitution and of the Laws of God” (Edsall 22) and saw the Malthusian doctrines behind it as “contrary to both Holy Scripture and decent human feeling” (Cole 70). The Cambridgeshire parson F. H. Maberly led an early campaign against the New Poor Law, and an “extraordinary number” of both Church of England and Nonconformist clergy subsequently joined the anti-Poor Law movement (Edsall 41–42; 63). Among the leading clergy outspoken in their criticism of society during the early Victorian period were the Revs. Joseph Rayner Stephens, Patrick Brewster, William Hill, and George Stringer Bull. These parsons were inclined to measure their society against Christian values: for instance, Rev. Joseph Rayner Stephens declared that his aim was to “apply the rule of God's commandments to various institutions of the social system” in order “to bring the operations of the manufactures, the commerce and legislation of this professedly Christian land to the standards of God's Holy Word” (The Political Preacher 6 Jan. 1839, 13–14; qtd. in Lyon). A number of politicians and other public figures, ranging from radicals to Tory paternalists – including Lord Ashley (Shaftesbury), Richard Oastler, and (in the earlier 1830s) Michael Sadler – also adopted this approach and consequently found society seriously wanting. Taking a similar stance were some prominent writers of the day, among them Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Fanny Trollope. Dickens, for instance, instigated his career-long Christian critique of his society's institutions in Oliver Twist (1837–38), exposing the reality of life in the workhouse from a specifically Christian perspective: Mr Bumble's seal and jacket buttons depicting the Good Samaritan are a rebuke to the institution in which he works and with which he conspires; the parable's message of universal brotherhood signally fails to count for anything. It is with this group of campaigners and writers, of course, that Thomas Hood belongs.

The figures involved were never a coherent group, though a number of them worked with one another. Distinguished by their perspective on society, their preoccupations were individually by no means their exclusive domain; nevertheless, they had characteristic concerns and outlooks.Footnote ² The group's two main targets for criticism were the unrestrained operation of the economic system and the new Poor Law, though these might be seen as twin aspects of a vision of society to which the Christian critics were fundamentally opposed. As G. D. H. Cole argues, the Whig government viewed their implementation of the New Poor Law as “an essential part of their policy of giving laissez-faire capitalism every chance” (65).Footnote ³ A number of these figures were concerned about the workings of the economic system, campaigning against the use of child labour in factories and mines and taking prominent roles in the Ten Hours Movement, which campaigned to reduce the working day from as much as sixteen hours to ten (and in the early days of which Michael Sadler appealed to “the words of Scripture itself” to argue that “the termination of labour should correspond to that of the day” [Times 17 Mar. 1832: 2]). More generally, in an 1844 speech Richard Oastler, for instance, pointed out the lack of accord between the values of “a Christian country” and the “immense heaps of wealth which have by the cruel factory system, been acquired, in utter disregard both of the physical and spiritual interests of the nation” (Times 12 Mar. 1844: 6). Oastler equally condemned the New Poor Law as “that unchristian and unconstitutional statute” (Times 8 Jan. 1839: 5). In an 1839 speech given in London, Stephens “besought the people no longer to remain subservient to so unlawful, so unchristian an enactment” and declared with regard to the Poor Law Commissioners that, “The acts of these men had for their object turning religion into infidelity” (Annual Register for 1839 67). Among his specific grounds for objecting to the Act were that it “treats the poor worse than the felon . . . makes marriage a mockery, and offers brutal violence to the holiest feelings of our nature, degrading the creature and dishonouring the Creator” (Times 8 Jan. 1839: 5).

Prominent in the outlook of this group of religious social critics was the notion of the brotherhood of man. Shaftesbury, for instance, in his August 4, 1840 speech to Parliament advocating a Royal Commission to investigate children's employment, asserted that: “I have been bold enough to undertake this task, because I must regard the objects of it as being created, like ourselves, by the same Master, redeemed by the same Saviour, and destined to the same immortality” (Bready 269). If Richard in Dickens's The Chimes (1844) eventually becomes “wasted by intemperance and vice” (134; Third Quarter), it is not because of innate moral weakness but because he loses a battle against circumstances in a society which doesn't recognise the brotherhood of man, in negation of the Bible: “thy people are Not my people; Nor thy God my God!” (133; Third Quarter). Dickens, by contrast, wants “the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood” not to be “debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy” (154; Fourth Quarter).

Being their brother's keeper involved concern about the immediate hardship and suffering of the less fortunate in their daily lives; anxiety that their humanity should not be diminished or fail to be developed; and a watchfulness about the state of their immortal souls. Concerns about the physical suffering of child labourers, for instance, are expressed by an 1840 correspondent to the Times who signed himself “The Children's Friend.” Deploring that “such barbarities are practised in a civilised and Christian country,” the writer describes the effects of such labour: “The physical consequences of these cruel impositions upon infant strength are consumption, scrofula, stunted growth, and rheumatism of a character sometimes so severe as to entirely incapacitate the sufferer from labour” (Times 14 Oct. 1840: 5). In her poem, “The Cry of the Children” (1843), Elizabeth Barrett Browning focuses on the same group of labourers and stresses the physical debilitation that arises from sheer hard work. Their physical state, with their “pale and sunken faces” (25) is unhealthy. They suffer from utter exhaustion, “weary” (65) and with “heavy eyelids drooping” (71). The pace of their work is relentless: the machines turn “all day” (77), unremitting and monotonous, “Till our hearts turn, – our heads, with pulses burning” (79). The child labourer's whole being is taken over by the machinery.

Anxiety about the dehumanisation of people lies behind Stephens's concern above that the workhouses were “degrading the creature” and Shaftesbury's worries in his 1842 Reply to the Lancashire Short Time Committee that, “Over a large surface of the industrial community man has been regarded as an animal, and that, an animal not of the highest order; his loftiest faculties when not prostrate, are perverted, and his lowest, exclusively devoted to the manufacture of wealth” (Bready 126). That the position of the poor was often perceived as very similar to that of slaves, with the implication not merely of financial exploitation but that those involved were being deprived of full human status, is reflected in Richard Oastler's early letter concerning factory children, published in the Leeds Mercury: “the system of infantile Slavery in Bradford is what I have described it to be – ‘More horrid than Colonial Slavery’” (30 Oct. 1830: 4) or Shaftesbury's description of child employment as “a system of slavery under the sanction of law” (qtd. in Bready 268–69).

The correspondent to the Times was also worried about the child labourers’ spiritual welfare:

More generally, one of Oastler's arguments in favour of the Ten Hours Bill was that, “It has been found utterly impossible to inculcate moral and religious principles into the minds of human beings who are engaged in factory labour, or any other labour, for a longer period” (Times 29 Feb. 1844: 5). The 1842 and 1843 Reports of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Children's Employment, set up as a result of the campaigning of Shaftesbury, heightened awareness of working children's ignorance of religion, as reflected in the remarks of eleven-year-old Henry Jowett, “I do not know who God is – Jesus Christ is heaven” (qtd. in Hammond and Hammond 73).Christian social critics worried that in addition to mere ignorance, the experiences of the poor would make them sceptical of religion. The children in Browning's “The Cry of the Children” are presented in a state of sheer lack of knowledge concerning religion; they barely know how to pray, but in as far as they do, they find God unresponsive:

The narrator then sums up the situation: “God's possible is taught by His world's loving – / And the children doubt of each” (135–36).

Dickens presents a similar point in his 1846 poem, “The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.” The poem, which attacks the sufferings of the poor arising out of the Corn Laws, was “Inspired by the urgent pleas for bread at a meeting of wives of agricultural labourers in Wiltshire” (Shelden 336–37). The labourers, referring to their “Lords and Gentry” (l. 16), plead in their distress,

Hood's poems reflect all these concerns and perceptions. The seamstress in “The Song of the Shirt” is a victim of capitalism and the unrestrained operation of the market. In a November 1843 court case, it was claimed that a seamstress “had only three-halfpence for making a shirt” (Northern Star 25 Nov. 1843: 7). Some months later, an inquest on a nineteen-year-old suicide, Eliza Kendall, heard that she was being paid “five farthings only . . . for making up some [shirts]”; the coroner's jury in the case condemned the practice of paying “so low a rate of wages as to preclude the possibility of a subsistence” (Northern Star 21 Aug. 1844: 6). Henry Moses, the slopseller in the Biddell case which inspired “The Song of the Shirt” (Whitley 509),Footnote ⁴ defended himself in a letter to the Times on the grounds that such low wages were the result of the competition at the core of a free market: “surrounded by a competitive market, I am compelled to sell as cheaply as my neighbours.” Workhouses at this time were also involved in shirt making, and Moses depicts “the competition of workhouse against independent labourers” as the cause of “the diminished rate of wage” (Times 31 Oct. 1843: 3). To supporters of the system, commitment to laissez faire meant that interference in the market out of compassion was quite unacceptable. In portraying the predicament of the Seamstress, Hood is involved in a debate about whether the market can and should be bucked.

Equally, the Poor Law and its operation are of concern to Hood. “The Pauper's Christmas Carol” is an indictment of the workhouse system. It reflects on the one hand how the workhouse environment was one in which “parsimony was pervasive” (Ashforth 140). “[D]iets were intended to provide nourishment as cheaply as possible,” with monotonous food provided by the supplier offering the lowest tender prepared by untrained pauper cooks (Wood 101). Hood's Pauper has become imbued with these cost-obsessed values: “But are raisins high or low, / Flour and suet cheap or dear?” (14–15). On the other hand, the poem reflects the famous custom involving the workhouse authorities giving their inmates a special treat on Christmas Day, so that, for instance, in the Kensington Union in 1838, “The poor . . . were each allowed six ounces of roast beef, half a pound of plum pudding, and a pint of porter, and are to have another half pound of plum pudding on New Year's-day” (Times 27 Dec. 1838: 2). Also part of the context of the poem, however, is that attempts had been made by the Poor Law Commissioners to stop even such treats (c.f. Times 22 Dec. 1840: 3).

Hood depicts the Labourer in “The Lay of the Labourer” as finding himself agonisingly caught between the operation of the economic system and the workhouse. During a period when agricultural wages were low to begin with (Wood 15), a slump in the market leaves the Labourer unemployed and thus in danger of having to go into the workhouse. David Englander sums up the officially-encouraged stigma attached to doing so: “Pauperism was a form of degradation and disgrace. To apply for relief was a cause for self-reproach and private humiliation; to enter the workhouse was a public admission of personal and moral failure. The authorities did everything to make it so” (44). The consequences were serious: the labourer is portrayed as driven by concern for his family, yet entry to the workhouse would mean separation from them: since he had abandoned his responsibility for looking after his family, he should be parted from them (Englander 38). Himmelfarb quotes the Report from his Majesty's Commissioners for Inquiry into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws on the wish of the Commissioners to create, “a broad line of distinction between the class of independent labourers and the class of paupers” (163). “The Lay of the Labourer” picks up this idea ironically: the Labourer wants to remain independent just as the much as the commissioners would want him to, but the operation of the economic system drives him, resisting utterly, towards becoming a pauper and not just poor.

Like his fellow Christian social critics, Hood views these social issues from the standpoint of a belief in the brotherhood of man. Thus, the Seamstress in “The Song of the Shirt” appeals to the common humanity shared by workers and employers and their families, hoping that having their own womenfolk – “sisters dear” (25) and “mothers and wives” (26) – will make the employers recognise that seamstresses too are fellow human beings and should be treated as such.

The poet's concern with the immediate suffering of the poor is reflected, for instance, in the same poem. The narrator emphasises from the start the Seamstress's physical debilitation, observing her in close-up with her “fingers weary and worn” and “eyelids heavy and red” (1, 2) before drawing back, in cinematic style, to see her in full figure, “Plying her needle and thread” (4) and registering her environment of “poverty, hunger, and dirt” (6). In his careful observation of her there is much sympathy for her “worn” fingers, her “red” eyes and her “voice of dolorous pitch” (7), against a background of society's ignorance and indifference (“Would that its tone could reach the rich!” [96]).

Hood's concern for the dehumanizing of the poor is well reflected in “The Pauper's Christmas Carol.” Englander quotes an observation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb that in the workhouse, “The environment thus created . . . starved both the will and the intelligence, and forced the pauper into a condition of blankmindedness”; he goes on to record how paupers were forbidden “anything . . . which provided scope for individual identity and personal expression” (38). The Pauper in the poem has already pitiably succumbed to the workhouse system thus described. The result is that the emotionally-alive human being is resuscitated and his full humanity restored to him only on the one day of the year upon which he is actually treated as a human being, “One of Nature's social chain” (29):

Cares are frozen as a result of his stunned state for the rest of the year, when he is so beaten down that even worries are at a standstill. During the remainder of the year, physical deprivation crushes the emotional and psychological aspects of the man which make us distinctively human. He becomes stultified and beaten down to the point where he loses his moral bearings and is unsure whether, during his brief emotional revival, to “dance and sing” (5) in gratitude and “bless my stars” (23) at the luxury afforded him, or sad and angry that it is so rarely accorded, to greet it “with a tear” (60). Bemused and bewildered, “I hardly know” (62) is the best answer he can come up with. In his revived state, he displays a willingness and ability to take part in human communal life, “Glad enough to sing a song” (50), but this state will not last long; the Pauper is dubious about his being disposed to “volunteer” (51) the next day. Even more fundamentally, the Pauper is uncertain of his survival to see “another feast” (42), the body threatened by “diet scant” and the spirit by “usage rough” (38). Hood draws on the imagery of slavery to help express his sense of the poor's loss of humanity in other poems of this group. Thus the desperate people in “The Workhouse Clock” are represented as “Poor slaves” (22); in “The Song of the Shirt”, the speaker finds herself longing “to be a slave” (13) as preferable to her actual predicament; and the workers in “The Lady's Dream” “toil like Afric slaves” (32).

Hood is also very aware of the effects of suffering on the poor's spiritual health and faith in God. The central character of “The Bridge of Sighs” has gone through so much that to her, “Even God's providence” seems “estranged” (54–55).As we shall see, in “The Lay of the Labourer” the Labourer's belief in God's benevolence suffers similar strains.

Such being Hood's outlook on social issues, how could he best present his critique of society? In different poems he employs a variety of devices and strategies to convey his message. “The Workhouse Clock,” for instance, relies largely on synecdoche and imagery. The poem depicts those who have lost the battle to remain independent, defeated people who no longer have their autonomy, the poor whose lives are in the power of the overseer, and who are in a pitiable state of dependence on his favour. The one human emotion they display – “Hope” (75) – about what the overseer may grant them – only demonstrates how much they are in thrall to him. The humanity of these people has otherwise been enormously diminished. They first appear in the poem not as whole human beings at all, merely “tongues” and “feet” (3, 4) and then as an anonymous mass, “The Labouring Classes” (6), a mob of “thousands” (10). Work and poverty have already deprived them of some of their human identity: “Some, of hardly human form, / Stunted, crooked, and crippled by toil” (25–26). It is further lost as they race to the workhouse in the degrading, frantic, undignified scramble depicted in the poem:

They are compared to animals, be it sheep (6, 72) or bees (“swarm” 29, 58). Worse, they become like inanimate nature, whether a river (16, 44–45) or a hurricane (47). The imagery emphasises that they have become degraded while reminding us that they are nevertheless part of nature and thus not to be regulated by the symbolically “artificial” dial (81). Even in this state, they remain superior to the mere instruments of work as which they are often treated, containing “A Blood-Power stronger than Steam” (56).

I want, though, to examine in detail here one particular strategy Hood adopts in exploring these concerns: the adaptation of a figure he originally deployed much earlier in his career, the sympathetic figure we may call the Hoodian hero. The figure appears as early as the 1820s in such poems as “Faithless Nelly Gray” and “Faithless Sally Brown.” The Hoodian hero (or heroine) is modest and undemanding, expecting nothing unreasonable out of life. He may come from a humble station – Ben Battle in “Faithless Nelly Gray” is a soldier, while Ben in “Faithless Sally Brown” is a carpenter – but he asks no more of life than anybody would want, such as love, and is without social aspiration. The latter Ben, for example, plans to marry Sally Brown who is simply a lady's maid. This type of hero faces life with equanimity as far as he can, taking it in his stride: thus Ben Battle is “used to war's alarms” (“Faithless Nelly Gray” 2) and Ben in “Faithless Sally Brown” somehow copes with the shock and hardship of being press ganged – in contrast to Sally who “did faint away” (7) and “wept outright” (22). The Hoodian hero is brave and stoical, as reflected in Ben Battle's joking when disaster strikes: “here I leave my second leg, / And the Forty-second Foot!” (“Faithless Nelly Gray” 7–8). (This stands in stark contrast to Nelly Gray's use of puns to him – “you stand upon / Another footing now” [31–32] – which reflect callousness and a dishonourable way of covering her embarrassment under flippancy as she rejects him). Ben in “Faithless Sally Brown” attempts to react to his rejection with bravery and stoicism: “And then began to eye his pipe . . . / And then he tried to sing ‘All's Well’” (59, 61). At this point, though, such qualities give way: “though he tried,” he “could not” (62). The Hoodian hero is a decent man, a man of good will, “a nice young man” (1) as “Faithless Sally Brown” has it, who is sturdy and tries to approach life with a positive outlook. However, he is confronted by a callous society, in which personal ties are fragile, which constantly tests his moral fibre and endurance. Along with the sturdiness is a vulnerability which means he cannot outface all situations: Ben Battle's “heart so heavy got” (“Faithless Nelly Gray” 50) after his rejection by Nelly Gray that “distress had cut him up” (63) to the point of suicide; equally, Sally Brown's rejection of Ben made him “heav[e] a bitter sigh” (“Faithless Sally Brown” 58) and turn mad. Having endured a great deal, the heroes eventually break down.

If the poems explore the question of how much a human being can endure, they do so in the context of a particular Hoodian perspective. It is the failure of moral values that precipitates the breakdown of the characters’ endurance. The “faithless” nature of both Nelly Gray and Sally Brown is what causes the men to crumble after they have endured, and come through, a great deal. In Hood's adaptation of this device in his group of social protest poems, the hero needs to face not just or primarily the failure of moral values in individuals but in society as a whole.

The trope of the Hoodian hero is adapted readily to use in Hood's poems of social comment because it complements his general vision of society as cruel, callous, and demanding powers of resilience in its members; the ability to endure is practically a condition of life. Thus poems in this group which do not feature the Hoodian hero nevertheless dwell on the trial of endurance faced by the protagonist. The generic hero of “A Drop of Gin,” for instance, does not fit the mould of the Hoodian hero: he is or was ambitious, entertaining “golden hopes” (46) in contrast to the Hoodian hero's modest expectations of life, and he struggles to show the equanimity of the Hoodian hero, having “[n]o light heart” (44). The poem is, however, about endurance and the reaching of a breaking point, signalled by a turning to gin, succumbing to “its tremendous temptations” (“A Drop of Gin” 66) in the midst of an unbearable life. The person for whom “darkly, Adversity's days set in” (26) needs endurance all the more in light of the moral failure of both those close to him and of his society. Individuals to whom he might turn prove faithless:

On top of this, though, society must also take blame in pushing the person beyond the limits of resilience. Once a man's life is on the slide, society is merciless in its onslaught:

The image of the spider is significant: we are here in a non-moral animal world, predatory, red in tooth and claw. An ordinary man tangled up helplessly in the mighty apparatus of the law and the state is soon driven to becoming “weary of life” (62). At his breaking point, he is thus primed to sink into the clutches of gin, “the fatal glass” (68).

“The Bridge of Sighs” equally deals with a woman pushed beyond the bounds of endurance to suicide:

There is no attempt to depict this woman as a Hoodian heroine. We meet her only in death, and she is pointedly introduced as an anonymous figure, just “One more Unfortunate,” a depressing addition to the statistics. The causes of her act include the faithless abandonment of her by her family:

Society more broadly, however, is implicated in the blame. Christian values have been abandoned: “Christian charity” (44) is a “rarity” (43), and the woman's status as a fellow human being (“One of Eve's family” [28]) did not cause her to be treated with Christian love. Instead, in the midst of a crowd she was lonely and abandoned: “Near a whole city full, / Home she had none” (47–48). At this stage she displayed an aforementioned tell-tale sign of one whose resilience is at breaking point. As the Labourer in “The Lay of the Labourer” comes to do, so the woman here in extremis begins to question God's loving nature: “Even God's providence / Seeming estranged” (“The Bridge of Sighs” 54–55). What caused (“spurr'd” [96]) her suicide, though, was society's callousness:

The narrator of the poem is in no doubt about the wrongness of the suicide. It was a “mutiny” (22) against God's laws, and thus “undutiful” (23) and “evil behaviour” (104). He suggests, however, that judging her, undertaking a “deep scrutiny” (21) of her action, is inappropriate in the circumstances and should be left “to her Saviour” (106). We should examine instead the ills of a society that pushed her beyond endurance.

Against this background, “The Song of the Shirt” and “The Lay of the Labourer” present their social criticism through a full-blown use of the Hoodian hero device, drawing heavily on the figure's sympathetic nature to increase the effectiveness of their portrayal of social ills. The protagonist of “The Song of the Shirt” is a typical Hoodian hero (or heroine). If she complains of her predicament, her demands are perfectly reasonable and ordinary, a wish to have better than, “That shatter'd roof – and this naked floor– / a broken chair” (45–46). Her modest longings are for simple pleasures: “Oh! but to breathe the breath / Of the cowslip and primrose sweet” (65–6) and to have “one short hour” (69) of feeling as she did before she knew “the woes of want” (71). She is self-disciplined and steady: as she relates in the second verse, she works from when the cock crows until when the stars shine; she later remarks that, “My labour never flags” (42). Equally, though “A little weeping would ease my heart” (77), she exercises great self-control:

She makes a courageous effort to keep going despite “fingers weary and worn” (1), “eyelids heavy and red” (2), and reaching a state in which “the heart is sick and the brain benumb'd, / As well as the weary hand” (55–56).

Sturdy, so far the woman is managing to endure. There are signs, however, of the pressure she is under. There is the “dolorous pitch” (7) of her voice, and the song itself, sung more to relieve her feelings than anything else. A Times article on seamstresses, “The White Slaves of London,” related that, “Sometimes as many as five or six young girls occupy one small room, in which they work and sleep and take their meals in common” (27 Oct. 1843: 4). Engels went further in his account of their lives, claiming that they lived “in little attics, where as many herd together as space will permit. In winter they crowd together for warmth, as they have no other source of heat” (239). That Hood has his Seamstress alone seems designed to underline that her song is not for the entertainment of any companions but a cry from an anguished heart. She compares herself to machines, drawing attention to how they, unlike human beings, are “Without a brain to ponder and craze / Or a heart to feel – and break!” (87–88). Life itself is in danger, as well as the wearing down of resilience, as revealed in her cry to her employers: “It is not linen you're wearing out, / But human creatures’ lives” (27–28). The form too reflects her distress in its disorder, with constantly changing rhyme schemes and the irregular distribution of the refrains (“Work – work – work” and “Seam and gusset and band”) throughout the poem. The woman's personality is under pressure and if, as yet, she endures, danger signs are present.

If the woman is under strain, the cause is the morality of a society that tolerates and encourages the attitudes and behaviour that create the circumstances in which she must live. What the Seamstress has to do is not “Christian work” (16), and this is the key to the poem. The abandonment of Christian moral values leads to the treatment of ordinary working people as if they are no more than machines:

The Golden Rule and the commandment to “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” however, both involve recognising all other human beings as brothers and sisters and treating them as ends rather than mere means. As we have seen, it is the need to recognise workers as fellow human beings and thus to treat them with Christian love that the Seamstress tries to urge on her employers: “Oh, Men with Sisters dear! / Oh, Men! with Mothers and Wives!” (25–26). The Seamstress is a human being, just like the sisters, mothers, and wives of her employers. With the abandonment of Christian morality and the domination of Mammon, there is no limit to the sufferings of the poor and their need for endurance. The risk of wearing out their workers physically as well as psychologically – the woman suspects she is sewing “A Shroud as well as a Shirt” (32) – seems to place no restraint on the employers’ harshness. Mammon rules, whether in the form of the Corn Laws fixing prices so that “bread should be so dear” (39) or in the untrammelled operation of the market making “flesh and blood so cheap” (40). The result is an immoral society unafraid to push workers’ endurance to breaking point.

The central character of “The Lay of the Labourer” is another Hoodian hero whose powers of endurance undergo testing. Like the Seamstress, he comes from humble origins, and once again we are presented with an undemanding person who has only entirely reasonable expectations of life:

With work he will provide modestly for himself and his family: “To make such humble meals / As honest labour can, / A bone and a crust” (79–81), and furnish a fire to warm his children:

He is a sturdy and unflinching man: “No job I'll shirk of the hardest work” (53). Yet he is also a man even nearer to the point at which he can endure no longer than the Seamstress in “The Song of the Shirt.” The operation of the market – here specifically an agricultural depression – has left him in dire straits with his children “starving” and having to “huddle and crouch” (23) in the absence of much of a fire, while at the same time he is desperate to “shun the workhouse walls” (54). He wants only to work, “No alms I ask, give me my task” (71), but is denied the opportunity. In “The Song of the Shirt,” the refrains served as an indicator of how overwhelmed the Seamstress was by her work, and how narrowed her world. Here, though, the Labourer's refrain,

serves as an indicator of his frustration. He repeatedly cries out for work which does not materialise. The Labourer conforms to the morality and values of his society: he accepts God's will, whatever the consequences for himself (27–30), and trusts in God to mete out justice rather than taking matters into his own hands (31–34). No class warrior or criminal, he presents no threat to his social superiors or their property (45–50) and accepts his own social standing (76–82). However, under the strain of his predicament, even as he mouths sentiments expressing acceptance of and compliance with received opinions, he begins to demur from them. Even as he says that he accepts God's providence (27–34) he seems to be challenging it with his despondent reference to “the fields forlorn” (28) that God has parched. Even as he states that his social superiors need fear nothing from him (43–50), he seems to be realising how easily he could attack them. He conjures up scenarios involving more and more of a direct confrontation via ever larger scale crimes: from talk of poaching a hare, he moves to talk of poaching a more substantial animal, a deer; he then entertains the idea of burglary (“To steal the plate so rich” [48]) and of robbery with violence. Each takes him closer to a personal confrontation with the rich, in which circumstances, the Labourer comes to realise, his physical strength could easily help him prevail, leaving his victim “To welter in a ditch” (50). The crimes become bolder and more aggressive, more and more remunerative if more and more desperate. Even as he asserts acceptance of his lowly social position (75–82), resentment seems to spring up at having, “To dress so mean, and to eat the lean / Instead of the fat of the earth” (77–78). Here is a man nearly able to endure no more, on the very point of rebelling. Once again, the irregularity of the rhyming patterns from verse to verse, the varying stanza length (the third verse has an extra line), and the irregular recurrence of the refrain (“A spade! a rake! a hoe!”) reflect his distress and mental disorder.

In this case too it is the immorality of society that drives the Labourer towards a breakdown of his resilience. The Labourer asserts himself to be “one of Adam's heirs” (75). This is a reminder to a society that does not always treat him as such that he is a fellow human being; simultaneously it is a reminder of God's decree (Genesis 3:19) that man shall work. In similar vein, if the words of the Lord's Prayer put the matter in God's hands, is it right that mere humans be allowed to deprive him of “My daily bread” (63)? An immoral society, not allowing the Labourer to work, offers as the only alternative the cruel workhouse:

For a man devoted to his family, the pressure this immoral situation creates threatens to break the Labourer's endurance.

Hood, of course, is not alone in using exemplary figures such as these to illuminate current social issues. Trotty Veck in Dickens's The Chimes provides another example. Trotty has quite a lot in common with the Hoodian hero: he is decent, sturdy, modest of ambition, and forced to endure a good deal. There are, however, some significant differences in Dickens's portrayal of his character. Firstly, Trotty is not alone as he faces his trials, and helps others face theirs, whereas Hood's characters face their predicament in solitude. As we have seen, the Seamstress lives and works on her own, and while the Labourer has a family, as the man of the house he shoulders all the worry over and responsibility for the family's fate alone. Dickens is often accused of sentimentality, but evidence indicates that here he is reflecting what often went on in reality. Wood comments on Victorian working class mores that, “While the good neighbour was one who respected privacy in normal times, failure to offer help in times of crisis meant serious loss of face” (39). Seerbohm Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life, admittedly from the very end of the century, records that, “Families which are, from any cause, in particularly hard straits, are often helped by those in circumstances but little better than their own. There is much of this mutual helpfulness among the very poor” (qtd. in McCord 108). The difference reinforces the bleakness of Hood's vision, as described above: the Hoodian hero, like the central characters of “A Drop of Gin” and “The Bridge of Sighs,” faces life's trials with support neither from family, friends, nor society.

There is also a considerable difference between the state of awareness of a Trotty Veck (or the children in “The Cry of the Children”) and the Hoodian hero. Trotty doesn't really understand the situation in which he finds himself: having heard criticisms of the poor, he wonders, “whether there is any good at all in us, or whether we are born bad” (The Chimes 87; First Quarter). The Hoodian hero, however, is aware of precisely what is happening: he or she is having to undergo suffering inexcusable in a society that supposedly lives by Christian values – a society that imposes work that is definitely not “Christian work” or ignores God's decree that man shall work. Their awareness is a direct indictment of society to a reader who is forced to confront the situation.

In recent criticism, Sara Lodge has found elements of playfulness in Hood's poems of social protest (Lodge 176, 191 f.f.); Rodney Stenning Edgecombe has argued that while “The Song of the Shirt” and “The Bridge of Sighs” “were extremely popular in their day” now “shifts in taste have lessened their impact,” leaving few modern readers who agree with Thackeray “that ‘The Song of the Shirt’ is ‘the finest lyric ever written’” (Edgecombe xix-xx). Nevertheless, as we have seen, Hood's poems of social criticism are deeply serious and concerned with issues of abiding relevance, exploring the limits of human endurance, the serious consequences of society's abandonment of Christian values, and the matter of how far capitalism is compatible with Christianity. The Hoodian hero is one important device used to explore these deep and urgent issues.