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Most of what is beyond the first paragraph of the lede should be moved into a section of the text. The lede is meant to be a summary of the article contents, not an essay unto itself.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 00:00, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
YK, as far as I can see Brantlinger asserts that Dickens Perils had a significant impact on British response to Indian rebellion (which ought to me mentioned). (See "Orphan texts: Victorian orphans, culture and empire" By Laura Peters) But nowhere that I can see does Brantlinger assert Dickens "spawned a new genre" of hate literature.
As I have asserted before
1) Racist fiction existed before Dickens & racism was prevalent in the Victorian detective novel.
2) Notable subsequent examples of racist fiction (for example in America The Klansmen or in Germany the racist element in Richard Wagner) are not particularly influenced by Dickens.
Ergo, I don't think we can assert this.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 16:26, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
I don't consider the quote from Brantlinger germaine to this article. I only note it here on Talk to observe that Brantlinger's view of Dickens is fairly nuanced, and he also regards Dickens as layered and complex. Thus not too much should be read into PB's statements. It is, as I already said above, on p. 117 of the book. It reads
For many middle-class writers the desire for raprochement between classes places them in the awkward position of stressing what they wish to overcome. Harriet Martineau is not alone in accusing Dickens of being a "humanity monger" and of making the poor hate the rich instead of love them. But Dickens sees himself [Ah, perhaps I misquoted-WG] as an advocate of social peace and criticisms like Martineau's must be balanced by the assessment of the Hammonds, who declare that Dickens did "more to draw English people together than any other influence in the time."[footnote] In any case, when "humanity mongers" can be perceived as dangers to the state...
I insist there is no significant body of later hate literature (novels or plays) influenced by Dickens, and I serious doubt that Brantlinger declares that there is. That is what "spawning a genre" would imply. None of the prominent examples of American racist literature (novels or plays) reflects any influence of Dickens at all! You are, I think, projecting something into PB which is not there, or else don't understand the implications of the word "spawned".
As for Brantlinger's view of Perils I am mostly going on what second-hand sources who cite PB say about him, mainly Grace Moore. I am at home rather in the library where I left it. I don't have the quote handy. However, see "Unequal partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian authorship" by Lillian Nayder on the contrast between Dickens and W.Collins. I quote from p. 167
As Patrick Brantlinger notes in his study of mutiny literature, British writing about India before 1857 generally suggested that the natives "might be helped to progress in the scale of civilization" but denied these "hopeful but obviously ethnocentric problems" after the sepoy revolt depicting the Sepoy Indians as inherently violent and superstitious. Yet Collins not only feels the mutineers can be reformed; he feels that reformers should look to oriental rather than Western ideals in accomplishing this ideal. Instead of preaching to the rebellious Indians from a Christian text, he draws from one of their own- from the lesson delivered to the seventeenth-century Muslim emperor Shah Jehan by the wise man Abbas...Collin disassociates himself from Dickens [emphasis added-WG] who expressed the desire to "exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested" when writing....about the mutiny. Whereas Dickens writes of a race "stained" with "cruelties" whose members have "disfigured the earth with...abominable atrocities, Collins suggests that the Indians are as capable of moral goodness as the British"
A couple pages later, Nayder suggests that in Collins' play The Moonstone, Collins conveys his sense that it was really Indians rather than British on the defensive in 1857.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 14:57, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
Nayder in commenting on a later work by Collins "A Sermon to the Sepoys".-- WickerGuy ( talk) 15:13, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
( talk page stalker) Would it not be better to say all of the above on the article talk page? I know from experience that YK will not budge from his anti-British ideas and WG seems pretty adamant that YK has got it wrong. So the pair of you will surely need to seek consensus by drawing on the thoughts of other parties. OTOH, if you both want to continue here then I guess that is your business. - Sitush ( talk) 15:34, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
I am aware that this article is in enormous danger of being a WP:POVFORK. First of all , the content of this section is controversial, but I still hope this can be discussed here from a WP:Neutral point of view. However, as there was an enormous danger of giving the whole issue WP:Undue weight (or notability) in the main article, that I feel there was also a legitimate reason for a sub-article.
It is true this was created in the wake of a heated content dispute (accompanied by some disruptive editing) on the main article on Dickens, which should indeed be a red flag. But even if the subject has been approached without full balance, I still think there are good reasons for the fork as well.
There is considerably less public discussion of Dickens' race issues than there is of that other 19th-century giant Richard Wagner. The San Francisco Jewish museum and Los Angeles' Holocaust museum devote a lot of space to Wagner's anti-Semitism, but none to Dickens. (Indeed, there was a showing of the film Oliver at the Jewish Museum of London in 2011). So on the one hand, it's good to be aware of it, but if the main article has a section on Dickens' legacy, the amount of space devoted to this issue there should be fairly minimal, at most I would think 10-20% of the legacy section.
This also accomplishes the task of separating skirmishes about this issue into a separate article-space, which is I think a good thing.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 05:18, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
Policy states "Any daughter article that deals with opinions about the subject of parent article must include suitably-weighted positive and negative opinions, and/or rebuttals, if available, and the original article should contain a neutral summary of the split article." Let's all try to keep to that, but just keep the battles/disputes here rather than in the main article.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 05:23, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
A legit issue at hand challenging this article is that:
1) On the one hand, virtually every opera fan in America sooner or later learns of Richard Wagner's disturbing essay Judaism in Music (Das Judenthum in der Musik), and most folks who like Wagner feel apologetic/disturbed etc. that the man who wrote the music they like also wrote this unsettling essay.
2) On the other hand, a large majority of Victorian literature fans (except for specialized scholars) have never even heard of Dickens' long-forgotten Noble Savage essay.
There is however a a modest public awareness of The Frozen Deep and The Perils of English Prisoners (still fairly minor works of Dickens), and a wide public awareness of the Fagin problem in Oliver Twist as well as an awareness that the Jewish community has largely forgiven Dickens for the latter (Addendum in strong contrast to continued apprehension about Richard Wagner).
So how WP:notable is this topic? Should we bring The Noble Savage and related works to greater public awareness or assume the lack of awareness makes the subject less notable?
My personal feeling is that since there is at least one full-length book solely devoted to discussing Dickens' relationship to imperialism (Grace Moore's Dickens and Empire) the topic might be worthy of its own article. However, others feel that since the topic is little discussed in books about Dickens in general (biographies or broad critical surveys of his body of work), it is not so notable.
Consider this a preliminary RFC.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 02:31, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
I am also correcting (my own) misspelling of the title of this section of the page.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 16:22, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
I just wish to say that I support the presence of the POV tag until such time as broad consensus is reached. While I am not against the existence of the page (I supported the creation of a subarticle along these lines), I do have concerns about the title, and in particular the use of the colon which could be seen to define Dickens' significance in terms of "Racism and anti-Semitism". — MistyMorn ( talk) 21:13, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
The original lede sentence "Although Charles Dickens is best-known as a writer of coming-of-age novels about children and adolescents and as a champion of the downtrodden poor, it has often been noted that both in his journalism and fiction he expresses attitudes that are profoundly racist and xenophobic." was deleted on the grounds of being synthesis. I am restoring it for two reasons.
1) WP is explicit that statements justified in the body of the article don't have to be cited in the lede. We already have in the body of the article "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 anti-semitic caricature of the character of Fagin." This justifies the lede statement, as does For authors Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, it is a puzzle as to how one can square away Dickens' racialism for concern with the poor and the downcast.
I will slightly modify and cite the statement, however.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 13:15, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
"The online Holocaust encyclopedia has five articles that mention Richard Wagner (though not one focused on him), one that mentions Ezra Pound, but they never even mention Charles Dickens at all. YK keeps this issue alive because he thinks Dickens' racism is still highly influential on contemporary life, when the rest of us understand it is not", the Curley-Dickens reconciliation is evidence of the contemporariness of Dickens' insults, and has been added to the article Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 15:00, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
1948 Oliver Twist banned in Egypt because it wasn't antisemitic enough? Sounds dubious, and the only source provided is some DVD review signed by initials. An extraordinary claim like that should require a more credible source.-- 84.108.213.97 ( talk) 21:09, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
The first three paragraphs of Charles Dickens' Racism and anti-Semitism#Fagin are the same as a section called "Allegations of anti-semitism and racism" published as part of an afterword to Dickens' novels, without attribution. Here is a link to an afterword to A tale of two cities. Several other sections appear to be the same as this source as well. TFD ( talk) 16:17, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
I've implemented a rename for several reasons.
First, most minor, and least disputable, the title "racism in the work of Charles Dickens" sidesteps the issue of whether the possessive apostrophe is correctly placed.
Second, the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is a subphenomenon of racism in general. There's probably a name for this sort of cross-taxon category error, but if there is, I'm not aware of it.
Thirdly, since Dickens is long dead, we can only assess his attitudes via his writing (fiction, essays, and journalism). The racist attitudes he held (which I am not denying) are a relic of his era, and are -- sadly -- quite unremarkable and typical for that time and place. It is not the presence of racist attitudes in the mind of a 19th-century Englishman which is a reasonable topic for an article, it is the presence of racist attitudes in the work of a notable author. DS ( talk) 15:08, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
===The Question of Prejudice===
Dickens was a forceful advocate of English middle-class virtues and national values, and stigmatised foreign cultures that he thought lacked these ideals. [1] His journalism and letters contain sporadic outbursts of kneejerk prejudice against non-whites. [2] While considering slavery an ‘hideous blot and foul disgrace’, Dickens thought the idea that emancipated slaves be allowed to vote ‘an absurdity’. In an 1853 essay on The Noble Savage, he wrote that primitive peoples were "cruel, false, thievish" and "murderous" and advocated that they be "civilised off the face of the earth". He defended Governor Eyre after the latter's savage repression of the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion. In Household words, and also a play he co-authorized with Wilkie Collins The Frozen Deep, a ‘melodrama in defence of national honour’, [3] he attacked John Rae's report on the Franklin expedition, based on Inuit testimonies. The English explorers had not engaged in cannibalism, but were victims of the ‘savage Eskimoes’ who were 'covetous and cruel'. [4] In the immediate aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, and the Cawnpore massacre, his antipathy to a "colonized people" reached "genocidal extremes" [5] when he wrote privately to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India. ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested ...". [6]ref> Nayder 2002, p. 101 :"I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement, . .should be to proclaim to them, in their language, that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the strain of the late cruelties rested; and that I begged them to do me the favor to observe that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth."</ref> Such outbursts were common among Dickens’ contemporaries. [7]Moore argues that Dickens modified his views, voiced also in his allegory The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. in the light of later reports of English brutalities, and that his sympathy for the rebellious sepoys emerges in his A Tale of Two Cities. (1859) [8] Others disagree: Nayder thinks his outlook became more ‘virulent’ over time. [9] Joshi allows that Dickens' prejudices were not racially grounded, but expressed his cultural chauvinism: Dickens lacked a notion of a superior "master race", was neither a white supremacist or segregationist. He retained however a powerful antipathy for the natives in British colonies, who functioned as a negative foil for Dickens' positive image of British virtues. [10]
Dickens' portrait of Fagin, described repeatedly as "the Jew" in Oliver Twist has often been seen as anti-Semitic. Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860, wrote to Dickens to protest his portrayal of Fagin, arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew". While Dickens pointed out that "all the rest of the wicked dramatis personae are Christians", and that he had "no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one", he took her complaint seriously. In Our Mutual Friend, he subsequently created a profoundly sympathetic Jewish character, "Riah",(said to be derived from Hebrew rē'eh (friend)). [11] whose goodness is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude for his 'atoning for an injury as soon as conscious of having inflicted it'. [12] [13] Nishidani ( talk) 15:47, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
References
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Most of what is beyond the first paragraph of the lede should be moved into a section of the text. The lede is meant to be a summary of the article contents, not an essay unto itself.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 00:00, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
YK, as far as I can see Brantlinger asserts that Dickens Perils had a significant impact on British response to Indian rebellion (which ought to me mentioned). (See "Orphan texts: Victorian orphans, culture and empire" By Laura Peters) But nowhere that I can see does Brantlinger assert Dickens "spawned a new genre" of hate literature.
As I have asserted before
1) Racist fiction existed before Dickens & racism was prevalent in the Victorian detective novel.
2) Notable subsequent examples of racist fiction (for example in America The Klansmen or in Germany the racist element in Richard Wagner) are not particularly influenced by Dickens.
Ergo, I don't think we can assert this.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 16:26, 14 March 2012 (UTC)
I don't consider the quote from Brantlinger germaine to this article. I only note it here on Talk to observe that Brantlinger's view of Dickens is fairly nuanced, and he also regards Dickens as layered and complex. Thus not too much should be read into PB's statements. It is, as I already said above, on p. 117 of the book. It reads
For many middle-class writers the desire for raprochement between classes places them in the awkward position of stressing what they wish to overcome. Harriet Martineau is not alone in accusing Dickens of being a "humanity monger" and of making the poor hate the rich instead of love them. But Dickens sees himself [Ah, perhaps I misquoted-WG] as an advocate of social peace and criticisms like Martineau's must be balanced by the assessment of the Hammonds, who declare that Dickens did "more to draw English people together than any other influence in the time."[footnote] In any case, when "humanity mongers" can be perceived as dangers to the state...
I insist there is no significant body of later hate literature (novels or plays) influenced by Dickens, and I serious doubt that Brantlinger declares that there is. That is what "spawning a genre" would imply. None of the prominent examples of American racist literature (novels or plays) reflects any influence of Dickens at all! You are, I think, projecting something into PB which is not there, or else don't understand the implications of the word "spawned".
As for Brantlinger's view of Perils I am mostly going on what second-hand sources who cite PB say about him, mainly Grace Moore. I am at home rather in the library where I left it. I don't have the quote handy. However, see "Unequal partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian authorship" by Lillian Nayder on the contrast between Dickens and W.Collins. I quote from p. 167
As Patrick Brantlinger notes in his study of mutiny literature, British writing about India before 1857 generally suggested that the natives "might be helped to progress in the scale of civilization" but denied these "hopeful but obviously ethnocentric problems" after the sepoy revolt depicting the Sepoy Indians as inherently violent and superstitious. Yet Collins not only feels the mutineers can be reformed; he feels that reformers should look to oriental rather than Western ideals in accomplishing this ideal. Instead of preaching to the rebellious Indians from a Christian text, he draws from one of their own- from the lesson delivered to the seventeenth-century Muslim emperor Shah Jehan by the wise man Abbas...Collin disassociates himself from Dickens [emphasis added-WG] who expressed the desire to "exterminate the race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested" when writing....about the mutiny. Whereas Dickens writes of a race "stained" with "cruelties" whose members have "disfigured the earth with...abominable atrocities, Collins suggests that the Indians are as capable of moral goodness as the British"
A couple pages later, Nayder suggests that in Collins' play The Moonstone, Collins conveys his sense that it was really Indians rather than British on the defensive in 1857.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 14:57, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
Nayder in commenting on a later work by Collins "A Sermon to the Sepoys".-- WickerGuy ( talk) 15:13, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
( talk page stalker) Would it not be better to say all of the above on the article talk page? I know from experience that YK will not budge from his anti-British ideas and WG seems pretty adamant that YK has got it wrong. So the pair of you will surely need to seek consensus by drawing on the thoughts of other parties. OTOH, if you both want to continue here then I guess that is your business. - Sitush ( talk) 15:34, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
I am aware that this article is in enormous danger of being a WP:POVFORK. First of all , the content of this section is controversial, but I still hope this can be discussed here from a WP:Neutral point of view. However, as there was an enormous danger of giving the whole issue WP:Undue weight (or notability) in the main article, that I feel there was also a legitimate reason for a sub-article.
It is true this was created in the wake of a heated content dispute (accompanied by some disruptive editing) on the main article on Dickens, which should indeed be a red flag. But even if the subject has been approached without full balance, I still think there are good reasons for the fork as well.
There is considerably less public discussion of Dickens' race issues than there is of that other 19th-century giant Richard Wagner. The San Francisco Jewish museum and Los Angeles' Holocaust museum devote a lot of space to Wagner's anti-Semitism, but none to Dickens. (Indeed, there was a showing of the film Oliver at the Jewish Museum of London in 2011). So on the one hand, it's good to be aware of it, but if the main article has a section on Dickens' legacy, the amount of space devoted to this issue there should be fairly minimal, at most I would think 10-20% of the legacy section.
This also accomplishes the task of separating skirmishes about this issue into a separate article-space, which is I think a good thing.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 05:18, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
Policy states "Any daughter article that deals with opinions about the subject of parent article must include suitably-weighted positive and negative opinions, and/or rebuttals, if available, and the original article should contain a neutral summary of the split article." Let's all try to keep to that, but just keep the battles/disputes here rather than in the main article.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 05:23, 17 March 2012 (UTC)
A legit issue at hand challenging this article is that:
1) On the one hand, virtually every opera fan in America sooner or later learns of Richard Wagner's disturbing essay Judaism in Music (Das Judenthum in der Musik), and most folks who like Wagner feel apologetic/disturbed etc. that the man who wrote the music they like also wrote this unsettling essay.
2) On the other hand, a large majority of Victorian literature fans (except for specialized scholars) have never even heard of Dickens' long-forgotten Noble Savage essay.
There is however a a modest public awareness of The Frozen Deep and The Perils of English Prisoners (still fairly minor works of Dickens), and a wide public awareness of the Fagin problem in Oliver Twist as well as an awareness that the Jewish community has largely forgiven Dickens for the latter (Addendum in strong contrast to continued apprehension about Richard Wagner).
So how WP:notable is this topic? Should we bring The Noble Savage and related works to greater public awareness or assume the lack of awareness makes the subject less notable?
My personal feeling is that since there is at least one full-length book solely devoted to discussing Dickens' relationship to imperialism (Grace Moore's Dickens and Empire) the topic might be worthy of its own article. However, others feel that since the topic is little discussed in books about Dickens in general (biographies or broad critical surveys of his body of work), it is not so notable.
Consider this a preliminary RFC.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 02:31, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
I am also correcting (my own) misspelling of the title of this section of the page.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 16:22, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
I just wish to say that I support the presence of the POV tag until such time as broad consensus is reached. While I am not against the existence of the page (I supported the creation of a subarticle along these lines), I do have concerns about the title, and in particular the use of the colon which could be seen to define Dickens' significance in terms of "Racism and anti-Semitism". — MistyMorn ( talk) 21:13, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
The original lede sentence "Although Charles Dickens is best-known as a writer of coming-of-age novels about children and adolescents and as a champion of the downtrodden poor, it has often been noted that both in his journalism and fiction he expresses attitudes that are profoundly racist and xenophobic." was deleted on the grounds of being synthesis. I am restoring it for two reasons.
1) WP is explicit that statements justified in the body of the article don't have to be cited in the lede. We already have in the body of the article "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 anti-semitic caricature of the character of Fagin." This justifies the lede statement, as does For authors Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, it is a puzzle as to how one can square away Dickens' racialism for concern with the poor and the downcast.
I will slightly modify and cite the statement, however.-- WickerGuy ( talk) 13:15, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
"The online Holocaust encyclopedia has five articles that mention Richard Wagner (though not one focused on him), one that mentions Ezra Pound, but they never even mention Charles Dickens at all. YK keeps this issue alive because he thinks Dickens' racism is still highly influential on contemporary life, when the rest of us understand it is not", the Curley-Dickens reconciliation is evidence of the contemporariness of Dickens' insults, and has been added to the article Yogesh Khandke ( talk) 15:00, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
1948 Oliver Twist banned in Egypt because it wasn't antisemitic enough? Sounds dubious, and the only source provided is some DVD review signed by initials. An extraordinary claim like that should require a more credible source.-- 84.108.213.97 ( talk) 21:09, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
The first three paragraphs of Charles Dickens' Racism and anti-Semitism#Fagin are the same as a section called "Allegations of anti-semitism and racism" published as part of an afterword to Dickens' novels, without attribution. Here is a link to an afterword to A tale of two cities. Several other sections appear to be the same as this source as well. TFD ( talk) 16:17, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
I've implemented a rename for several reasons.
First, most minor, and least disputable, the title "racism in the work of Charles Dickens" sidesteps the issue of whether the possessive apostrophe is correctly placed.
Second, the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is a subphenomenon of racism in general. There's probably a name for this sort of cross-taxon category error, but if there is, I'm not aware of it.
Thirdly, since Dickens is long dead, we can only assess his attitudes via his writing (fiction, essays, and journalism). The racist attitudes he held (which I am not denying) are a relic of his era, and are -- sadly -- quite unremarkable and typical for that time and place. It is not the presence of racist attitudes in the mind of a 19th-century Englishman which is a reasonable topic for an article, it is the presence of racist attitudes in the work of a notable author. DS ( talk) 15:08, 12 April 2012 (UTC)
===The Question of Prejudice===
Dickens was a forceful advocate of English middle-class virtues and national values, and stigmatised foreign cultures that he thought lacked these ideals. [1] His journalism and letters contain sporadic outbursts of kneejerk prejudice against non-whites. [2] While considering slavery an ‘hideous blot and foul disgrace’, Dickens thought the idea that emancipated slaves be allowed to vote ‘an absurdity’. In an 1853 essay on The Noble Savage, he wrote that primitive peoples were "cruel, false, thievish" and "murderous" and advocated that they be "civilised off the face of the earth". He defended Governor Eyre after the latter's savage repression of the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion. In Household words, and also a play he co-authorized with Wilkie Collins The Frozen Deep, a ‘melodrama in defence of national honour’, [3] he attacked John Rae's report on the Franklin expedition, based on Inuit testimonies. The English explorers had not engaged in cannibalism, but were victims of the ‘savage Eskimoes’ who were 'covetous and cruel'. [4] In the immediate aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, and the Cawnpore massacre, his antipathy to a "colonized people" reached "genocidal extremes" [5] when he wrote privately to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India. ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested ...". [6]ref> Nayder 2002, p. 101 :"I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement, . .should be to proclaim to them, in their language, that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the strain of the late cruelties rested; and that I begged them to do me the favor to observe that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth."</ref> Such outbursts were common among Dickens’ contemporaries. [7]Moore argues that Dickens modified his views, voiced also in his allegory The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. in the light of later reports of English brutalities, and that his sympathy for the rebellious sepoys emerges in his A Tale of Two Cities. (1859) [8] Others disagree: Nayder thinks his outlook became more ‘virulent’ over time. [9] Joshi allows that Dickens' prejudices were not racially grounded, but expressed his cultural chauvinism: Dickens lacked a notion of a superior "master race", was neither a white supremacist or segregationist. He retained however a powerful antipathy for the natives in British colonies, who functioned as a negative foil for Dickens' positive image of British virtues. [10]
Dickens' portrait of Fagin, described repeatedly as "the Jew" in Oliver Twist has often been seen as anti-Semitic. Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860, wrote to Dickens to protest his portrayal of Fagin, arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew". While Dickens pointed out that "all the rest of the wicked dramatis personae are Christians", and that he had "no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one", he took her complaint seriously. In Our Mutual Friend, he subsequently created a profoundly sympathetic Jewish character, "Riah",(said to be derived from Hebrew rē'eh (friend)). [11] whose goodness is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude for his 'atoning for an injury as soon as conscious of having inflicted it'. [12] [13] Nishidani ( talk) 15:47, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
References