Sorry, Charles: Even Dickens Wasn’t Woke Enough

Over 150 years after his death, the great novelist and humanitarian Charles Dickens is facing a new round of criticism. This time, it takes the form of an internal memo sent to the staff of Rochester’s Guildhall Museum, which hosts the permanent “Making of Mr. Dickens” exhibition, opened by Queen Camilla in 2022. Workers were told to repudiate Dickens’ “particularly upsetting views” and to acknowledge that some of Dickens’ beliefs “can cause great offence today.”

Among Dickens’ cardinal sins were his support for the British Empire, his alleged belief that the empire was “the best way to make the world more like white, middle-class England,” and that he even, apparently, “made a link between race and moral worth” occasionally. According to the memo: “Today we reject his views, but even at this time, there were a number of important figures who argued for the universal worth of all people and cultures, regardless of race or background.”

“We have to acknowledge that Dickens did not think like this,” the museum bosses concluded sadly. To translate: “Dickens did not think like us.” A more enlightened Dickens, presumably, would have endorsed abortion until birth as a solution to the plight of the orphans that occupied so much of his time; surely, he would also have been a fan of euthanasia as a solution to suffering and the elimination of Christianity in favor of the sexual revolution. But—alas!—he did not. He was cursed to be a Victorian.

These critiques would be boring if they were not so stupid. The museum staff have fallen prey to what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery”—that is, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” Lewis noted that “the only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds and this can only be done by reading old books.” This is the quaint idea that those who built our civilization may have things to teach us.

Even Dickens’ defenders in this battle of Pipsqueaks vs. Titan default to chronological snobbery. Local historian Shane Waterman told the press that Dickens “was seen as very much a progressive, a liberal, particularly all his work with championing the poor. He was very much on the left of the politics of the day.” In short, his defense is that Dickens, as an embryonic progressive, should be recognized by those attacking him as flawed but noble forebear. Waterman is falsely implying that care for the poor is leftist.

Dickens deserves a better defense than merely producing the old Darwinian “March of Progress” ape-to-man chart so beloved by the progressives and identifying him as the slightly-hunched primate well on his way—just a few more stages to go!—to becoming a fully evolved progressive human being (perhaps a trans activist protesting a J.K. Rowling book-signing). Waterman is obviously correct that Dickens’ beliefs must be taken in context, but his defense operates from the same false premises held by his detractors. 

Dickens, like the unfashionable Christians who launched the abolitionist movement and spearheaded the social reform movements that transformed English society from prison charities to bear-baiting bans, staunchly opposed slavery. He cared about the poor because his Bible told him to (meanwhile, Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton suggested that people with disabilities be put in camps, an idea Darwin was enthused about). Today’s sexual revolutionaries have no claim on the legacy of the Christians who freed the slaves and uplifted the poor in the name of God.

All great men and women are sinners, but observing which sins society fixates on reveals much about its character. Dickens’ greatest flaw was the fact that he was unfaithful to his wife, which was once viewed by saner critics in saner times as a blemish on his character. In our time, however, Dickens’ adultery merely makes him more interesting. We have evolved on matters of sexual morality, which is to say that we do not have any. Dickens’ real sin, we are now somberly told, is that he did not see all cultures as equal. I suspect his wife would have disagreed.

It is not too much to ask that museums committed to celebrating the legacies of great men and women should be staffed by people who actually like them and are willing to defend those legacies. Those offended by Dickens should avoid his museum, stay home, and perhaps watch one of the many wretched film adaptations of great English works filled with anachronistic characters and pornography, made by people who think just like them.