Many view Charles Dickens as the inventor of modern Christmas. This is largely due to his beloved 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Given his association with the holiday, Christmas is an appropriate time to reassess the man. Rather than a kindhearted champion of the oppressed, Dickens was a monstrous villain who taught millions to hate capitalism.
The Dickens Mythology
Dickens’s daughter Katey warned, “My father was a wicked man—a very wicked man.” So why is he widely regarded as a saint? While this might shock the casual readers, every serious student knows that there is a Dickens mythology. What is more, the novelist himself conspired to create his mythology. Helena Kelly explains in her 2023 book The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens,
It’s not just that [Dickens’s] biography isn’t the whole story—it was designed to distract and deceive. Dickens the conjurer and his faithful assistant [John Forster] have been playing tricks on us all this time. They’ve been feeding us lies, directing our gaze away from what they wanted to keep hidden. (pp. xiv–xv)
The Great Charles Dickens Scandal is the clearest case of the mythology. In 1836, Dickens married his wife, Catherine, and she gave him ten children. In the summer of 1857, at the age of forty-five, he began an affair with an 18-year-old actress named Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. He separated from his wife in 1858, but they never divorced. His secret relationship with Ternan continued until he died in 1870.
Naturally, Dickens and his henchman John Forster covered up the affair in their official biography. Shamefully, later biographers continued the cover-up—including G.K. Chesterton (1906), Edward Wagenknecht (1929), and Una Pope-Hennessy (1945). With Claire Tomalin’s 1990 book The Invisible Woman, it is now impossible to deny the affair.
By itself, an affair with a teenager might not be enough to deprogram members of the Dickens Cult. Still, the episode shows two things: 1) Dickens was a manipulator, and, 2) there is a Dickens industry that continues to lie for him. So what else does the industry have to hide?
Dickens’s Sexism
Dickens’s affair led to a more troubling finding—namely, he was a ruthless husband. In The Mystery of Charles Dickens, A.N. Wilson highlights “his appalling cruelty to a harmless wife who bore him ten children” (p. 5) and “That he was cruel cannot be denied” (p. 134).
For example, friends refused to visit the Dickens’ household because he would curse at his wife in front of guests, children, and servants. In late 1857, he divided the marital bedroom into separate spaces and sealed the internal door to isolate her. Then, in early 1858, he tried to convince a doctor who was a friend to lock her up in an insane asylum.
[Dickens] tried to have his wife committed to a lunatic asylum when their marriage broke down in 1858. This would have been a dreadful fate, imprisonment without trial or guilt, little chance to plead your case and no one to believe you if you did. Terrible enough in a case of genuine mental illness; monstrous if the real motive was simply someone else’s convenience or reputation. (pp. 239–40)
In this inexcusable case of domestic abuse, Dickens attempted to deprive his wife of her liberty through institutional violence. Rather than renouncing their saint, Dickens lovers write it off as a mystery:
[Dickens] had tried to persuade the doctor who attended her to sanction an accusation of mental illness, which would permit him to have her confined to an asylum. Dickens had close friends in the medical profession. . . . The mystery was: how could the apostle of kindliness, the novelist who, more than any other, extols the virtues of charity, who waged war on Scrooge, and Bumble and Bounderby, how could he, of all the people in the world, be so furiously unkind, so vindictively, pointedly and quite unnecessarily cruel, to the woman who had borne his children, and who faults, in so far as anyone has noted them, were so trivial? (p. 104)
Yet the mystery is easily solved: Dickens was a sexist. John Stuart Mill realized this in 1854 when he read Bleak House. Mill vented, “That creature Dickens. . .has the vulgar impudence in this thing to ridicule rights of women.” Today, his sexism is well known to informed readers: “It is commonplace to observe Dickens’s view of women as sentimental, sexist, patriarchal, and derogatory” (p. 37). Dickens’s sexism explains how he could be so viciously unkind to his wife.
Most feminists would argue that women were an oppressed group in 1850s England. Women lacked many legal rights: married women could not own property independently, control their own income, or claim custody of their children. As women represent half the population, Dickens’s sexism means it is absurd to consider him a true champion of the oppressed.
Dickens’s Racism, Imperialism, and Genocidal Lunacy
Alongside his misogyny, the Dickens industry is desperate to conceal his racism. According to Peter Ackroyd, “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 decent and benevolent.” Kelly agrees, “Dickens was an anti-semite, a racist who expressed a belief in innate British superiority” (p. 257).
On Dickens’s racism, the key evidence comes from his publications American Notes (1843) and “The Noble Savage” (1853). Laura Peters explains in Dickens and Race (p. 76),
Between American Notes and “The Noble Savage”, Dickens moves seamlessly between indigenous populations and largely black African populations. Both for Dickens are viewed as savage, undifferentiated, uniform racial otherness; Dickens welcomes the demise of such savagery to be replaced by the civilised values of an Englishman. . . . [C]ivilisation is not a state which those from other races could aspire.
To put it bluntly, Dickens was a white supremacist. But his supremacism went beyond white supremacism. He found whites in Ireland, Italy, and America inferior to whites in England. For him, white English males were supreme—the only people capable of true civilization. Naturally, this English supremacism led him to be a diehard British imperialist: “Dickens’ sympathy for the downtrodden poor at home is reversed abroad, translated into approval of imperial domination” (p. 207).
His most unforgivable comments involve the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Put plainly, Dickens was a genocidal maniac. He raged, “I wish I were Commander in Chief in India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race . . . I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race . . . [I would] blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth” (p. 799).
Honest scholars agree that he called for “genocide” (pp. 799, 155 respectively). How do Dickens cultists defend this? They insist his genocidal phase was short. On the contrary, Peters stresses that “this extermination rhetoric continues throughout the 1850s and beyond, becoming more ominous until it arrives at the deadly eugenic rhetoric at the turn of the century.”
During his lifetime, the British Empire ruled hundreds of millions of non-whites. And, of course, the British imperialistic regime was oppressive. Given his racism, imperialism, and exterminationism, the idea that Dickens was a crusader for the oppressed is ludicrous.
Dickens and Capitalism
Ludwig von Mises was the twentieth century’s leading defender of capitalism. He wrote, “Dickens, with other romantics less gifted as storytellers but following the same tendencies, has taught millions to hate [Classical] Liberalism and Capitalism.” Is this an unfair statement by a biased capitalist?
Karl Marx was a great fan, and he praised Dickens for teaching millions to hate capitalism. In 1854, Marx wrote (as quoted in Ackroyd, p. 544) that Dickens had “issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together.”
The famous English historian and liberal politician Thomas Babington Macaulay was a contemporary of Dickens, and he viewed Hard Times as “sullen socialism.” In 1908, Edwin Pugh published Charles Dickens: The Apostle of the People, where Dickens is described as an “unconscious socialist” and “a socialist without knowing it.”
The famous playwright George Bernard Shaw was a key leader of Fabian socialism. He wrote a glowing introduction to the 1913 edition of Hard Times, and penned: “[Hard Times] is Karl Marx, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter, rising up against civilization.” Shaw said Little Dorrit made him a socialist, and he thought that book was “more seditious than [Marx’s] Das Kapital.”
In 1937, Thomas Alfred Jackson wrote that Dickens’s socio-economic thought “might easily have emerged as positive Socialism or Communism” (p. 11). To Jackson, “[Dickens] takes a ground indistinguishable from that taken by Marx and Engels” (p. 39). In summary, prominent supporters and detractors agree that Dickens was one of history’s most successful critics of capitalism.
Conclusion
When watching A Christmas Carol, remember that Charles Dickens was not a kind, compassionate man like Bob Cratchit. And he was certainly not a good capitalist like Scrooge. Rather, Dickens was manipulative, domineering, unfaithful, abusive, sexist, racist, imperialistic, and genocidal. He was an economic ignoramus who did incalculable harm to the world by duping millions of gullible readers into hating capitalism. To be sure, his daughter Katey was correct: Dickens was a wicked man—a very wicked man.
