Post #2839671

https://unherd.com/newsroom/it-is-absurd-to-condemn-charles-dickens-as-racist/ The fact is that if your standard of aesthetic judgement is whether you happen to agree with a novelist or not, the merits of a novel will hurtle, implausibly, from greatness to its opposite, eating up and spitting out a succession of masterpieces as you go. A few decades ago, Huckleberry Finn was considered by some to be the greatest of all American novels. Now you’d sooner find a critic advocating the genocide of the people of Idaho than admitting to admiring it. It appears impossible to the junior curators of a provincial museum that anyone might enjoy and even admire a novel without considering whether they would agree with its author on all subjects. Indian readers were apparently untroubled by Dickens’s views on their society. In the very extensive network of English-language subscription libraries in India in the late 19th century, Dickens remained the third most popular author after Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton for decades. The only thing worth saying about the unresisting imbecility of the curators of Rochester is that they are trying to dismiss the savage creator of Wackford Squeers, Old Turveydrop, Mrs Gamp, Uriah Heep and hundreds of others. What a page Dickens would have written about the sanctimonious individuals who take a monthly salary and comfortably denounce one of the greatest novelists who ever lived. Dickens hated hypocrisy and dishonesty more than anything. Here, he would have riches to feast on.