If that’s not enough to convince the Orwells of today, you have only to look around you: at the thriving indifference of wealth and the unhinging of labor; the dejection of the jobless and Newt Gingrich’s demands for child labor; the dread of a blackening horizon and the people of Zuccotti Park. Dickens was a writer who, in every book, grappled with the big, modern machine called capitalism, with all its successes and failures. Nearly all the people who find their way into his world are there because they struggle as hangers-on to a flawed system—burglars and bailiffs, craftsmen and children, Plornishes and Peggottys.Personally, I'm just grateful that in the last year or so I finally read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, both of which I'll read again and again 'til they freeze my lifeless body between Walt Disney and Ted Williams. I'm embarrassed at the dozens of works I have yet to read, an idiotic oversight which I plan on correcting in the upcoming weeks/months.
As much as the critic Edmund Wilson claimed that Dickens was not interested in politics, it is politics that most Dickens critics write about. It is no accident that those appraisers who dealt so squarely with his legacy, from G.K. Chesterton to Christopher Hitchens, were themselves so very politically minded. They—all of them—have something to say about his shortcomings as a novelist: everyone knows the E.M. Forster judgment of Dickens’s characters being “flat” as opposed to “round,” though even he had to admit that “the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate.” But very seldom do they disparage the morals of his stories, or disagree with his attacks on English institutions, even as they downplay their significance in the construct of his canon.
And no - the above quote isn't about THIS EDMUND WILSON!
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