Scholars have discussed the topic of racism in the works of 19th-century English author Charles Dickens, with increased focus in the 20th and 21st centuries. While Dickens was known to be highly sympathetic to the plight of the poor and disadvantaged in British society, like many other authors of the period he expressed attitudes in his journalism and works which have been interpreted as racist and xenophobic. Dickens frequently defended the privileges held by Europeans in overseas colonies and was dismissive of what he termed "primitive" cultures. The Oxford Dictionary of English Literature describes Dickens as a nationalist who frequently stigmatised non-European cultures.Kastan, David Scott (2006). Oxford Encyclopedia of English Literature, vol 1. Oxford University Press. p. 157. , 9780195169218
Some scholars have disputed the charge that Dickens was racist. Dickens scholar Priti Joshi, for example, maintains that he never advocated any form of scientific racism in his works, but held extreme antipathy for non-European peoples, and steadfastly believed in their assimilation into Western culture.Joshi, Priti (2011). ‘Race.’ In Dickens in Context, edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, Cambridge University Press. pp. 297–299. , 9780521887007. Other scholars, such as Grace Moore, claim that Dickens' racism abated in his later years, while historian Patrick Brantlinger and journalist William Oddie have instead claimed that his racism intensified during that period. Moore contends that while in his later years Dickens became more aware of the mistreatment of non-European peoples under the system of colonialism, he never lost his antipathy for their culture, consistently maintaining that it was inferior to Western culture.Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century Series) (Ashgate: 2004).
Controversies over Dickens' racism
Many scholars have commented on the contrast between his support for liberal causes at home and lack of such support for liberal causes abroad. In a private letter to Emily de la Rue, Dickens wrote the following passage on Indians: "You know faces, when they are not brown; you know common experiences when they are not under turbans; Look at the dogs low, treacherous, murderous, tigerous villains." Dickens also called for the "extermination" of the Indian people and applauded the "mutilation" of the "wretched Hindoo" who were punished by being blown from the guns for the involvement in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.["The Speeches of Charles Dickens", K.J. Fielding, Ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1960, p. 284] In his 1990 biography, Peter Ackroyd noted Dickens' sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labour, involvement in campaigns for sanitation reform, and opposition to capital punishment. He also asserted that "In modern terminology Dickens was a "racist" of the most egregious kind, a fact that ought to give pause to those who persist in believing that he was necessarily the epitome of all that was decent and benign in the previous century." This is not the abridged edition published by Vintage as a tie-in to the BBC documentary
According to Ackroyd, Dickens did not believe that the Union in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the Confederacy for that reason. Ackroyd twice noted that Dickens' major objection to missionaries was that they were more concerned with the welfare of non-Europeans abroad than with the poor at home in Europe. For example, in Bleak House Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children to care for the inhabitants of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his stereotypical depiction of other races has also been a topic considered by Patrick Brantlinger in his 2002 A Companion to the Victorian Novel. He cites Dickens' description of an Irish-American settlement in America's Catskill mountains as a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. According to Brantlinger, Dickens viewed them as a "racially repellent" group. Jane Smiley, in her Penguin Lives biography of Dickens, writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal we know today he was racist, imperialist, sometimes antisemitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions". An opening note to Charles Dickens' Australia, a selection of Dickens' essays from Household Words, noted to the reader that in these essays "Women, the Irish, Chinese and Aborigines are described in biased, racist, stereotypical or otherwise less than flattering terms." The Historical Encyclopedia of Anti-Semitism notes the paradox of Dickens both being a "champion of causes of the oppressed" who abhorred slavery and supported the European liberal revolutions of the 1840s, and his creation of the antisemitic caricature of the character of Fagin.
Scholar Priti Joshi, in her contribution to Dickens in Context examined the contrast between Dickens' racism and his concern with the poor and downcast. Joshi argues that Dicken was a nativist and a "cultural chauvinist" in the sense of being highly ethnocentric and supportive of imperialism, but maintains that he was not a racist in the sense of being a "biological determinist" as was the anthropologist Robert Knox. That is, Dickens did not regard the behaviour of races to be "fixed"; rather his appeal to "civilization" suggests not biological fixity but the possibility of alteration. However, "Dickens's views of racial others, most fully developed in his short fiction, indicate that for him 'savages' functioned as a handy foil against which British national identity could emerge".
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature similarly notes that while Dickens praised middle-class values,
William Oddie argues that Dickens's racism "grew progressively more illiberal over the course of his career," particularly after the Indian Rebellion.Dickens and Carlyle: the Question of Influence (London: Centenary) pp. 135–42, and “Dickens and the Indian Mutiny”, Dickensian 68 (January 1972), 3–15; Grace Moore, on the other hand, argues in her 2004 work Dickens and Empire that Dickens, a staunch abolitionist and anti-imperialist, had views on racial matters that were a good deal more complex than previous critics have suggested.Dickens and Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century Series) (Ashgate: 2004). She suggests that overemphasising Dickens' racism obscures his continued commitment to the abolition of slavery."Reappraising Dickens' Noble Savage" Dickensian 98.3 2002 p. 236-44 Laurence Mazzeno has characterised Moore's approach as depicting Dickens' attitude to race as highly complex, "struggling to differentiate between ideas of race and class in his fiction...sometimes in step with his age, sometimes its fiercest critic." Others have observed that Dickens also opposed granting voting rights to African Americans, writing in a letter "Free of course he must be; but the stupendous absurdity of making him a voter glares out of every roll of his eye". Bernard Porter suggests that Dickens' racism caused him to actually oppose imperialism rather than promote it, citing the character of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House and the essay The Noble Savage as evidence. However, Dickens did not join other liberals in condemning the Governor of Jamaica Eyre's declaration of martial law after an attack on the capital's courthouse. In speaking on the controversy, Dickens' attacked "that platform sympathy with the black- or the native or the Devil.."
In an essay on George Eliot, K.M. Newton writes:
Fagin and antisemitism in Oliver Twist
One of the most controversial characters created by Dickens is the British Jew Fagin in the novel Oliver Twist, first published in serial form between 1837 and 1839. The character of Fagin has been seen by many as being stereotypical and containing antisemitic tropes, though others, such as Dickens's biographer G. K. Chesterton have argued against this view. Scholars have noted that the novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as "the Jew", while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned. Paul Vallely wrote in The Independent that Dickens's Fagin in Oliver Twist—the Jew who runs a school in London for child pickpockets—is regularly seen as one of the most grotesque Jewish characters in English literature. The character is thought to have been partly based on Ikey Solomon, a Jewish criminal in Victorian era-London, who was interviewed by Dickens during the latter's time as a journalist.Rutland, Suzanne D. The Jews in Australia. Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 19. ; Newey, Vincent. The Scriptures of Charles Dickens. Nadia Valdman, who specialises in the portrayal of Jewish people in literature, argues that Fagin's representation was drawn from images of Jews created by non-Jews as "inherently evil" as associated with the Devil and beasts.Valdman, Nadia. Antisemitism, A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution. Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution argues that the image of Fagin is "drawn from stage melodrama and medieval images". Fagin has also been described by scholars as one who seduces young children into a life of crime, and as someone who can "disorder representational boundaries".
In 1854, The Jewish Chronicle published an article which questioned why "Jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed". Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in protest against his portrayal of Jews (specifically Fagin), arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew", and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. Dickens had described her husband at the time of the sale as a "Jewish moneylender" (but also as an "honest gentleman").
Dickens protested that he was merely being factual about the realities of street crime in London in his depiction of criminals in their "squalid misery", yet he took Mrs Davis's complaint seriously; he halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him. In his later novel Our Mutual Friend, he created the character of Riah (meaning "friend" in Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as samples of the best ..." Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude. Dickens not only toned down Fagin's Jewishness in revised editions of Oliver Twist, but he removed Jewish elements from his depiction of Fagin in his public readings from the novel, omitting nasal voice mannerisms and body language he had included in earlier readings.
Stage and screen adaptations