Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic brings out the limits of Dickens’s celebrated ‘compassion’. Taking up a suggestion of John Forster, Dickens’s friend and first biographer, Hitchens suggests that Dickens responded most powerfully to the kinds of injustice and deprivation he experienced in childhood. When it came to other races and other places, however, he exhibits mean-mindedness and plain brutality.
. . . radicals and reformers in mid-19th-century England were to be defined above all as sympathizers with the American Revolution and with the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Dickens was scornful of the first and hostile to the second. His exiguous chapter on slavery in American Notes was lazily annexed word-for-word from a famous abolitionist pamphlet of the day, and employed chiefly to discredit the whole American idea. But when it came to a fight on the question, he was on balance sympathetic to the Confederate states, which he had never visited, and made remarks about Negroes that might have shocked even the pathologically racist Carlyle. I had not understood, before. . . that the full title, American Notes for General Circulation, was a laborious pun on the supposed bankruptcy of the whole “currency” of the United States.
It’s obvious from the non-fiction that Dickens was no kind of systematic thinker. He lived with moral muddles, contradictions and deep-rooted prejudice. That’s there in the work as well (no Flaubertian defences here) and especially in the way his denouements so often depend on the figure of the benign capitalist – the Brothers Cheeryble descending on a machine. His novels are full of vividly-created characters and types from the growing lower-middle class. This was new. But as I read him, Dickens had no interest in people getting above themselves. American Notes is full of condescension.
Is he then a radical novelist at all? Perhaps so . . .