Racism in the work of Charles Dickens

Controversies over Dickens’ racism

Many scholars have noted the paradox between Dickens’ support for various liberal causes and his racism, nationalist chauvinism and imperialist mentality. Biographer Peter Ackroyd in his 1990 biography of Dickens duly notes Dickens’ sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labor , campaigns for sanitation reform, and opposition to capital punishment. He also asserts that “In modern terminology Dickens was a” racist “of the most egregious kind, a fact that should be kept in mind that it was necessarily the epitome of all that was decent and benign in the previous century . ” ^[5] Ackroyd also notes that Dickens did not believe that the North in theAmerican Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery , and he almost publicly supported the South for that reason. Ackroyd twice notes that Dickens’ major objection to missionaries was that they were more concerned with natives abroad than with the poor at home. For example, in his novel Bleak House Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens’ criticism of slavery and his crude caricatures of other races has been noted by Patrick Brantlinger in his A Companion to the Victorian Novel. He cites Dickens’ description of an Irish colony in America’s Catskill mountains a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. Dickens views them as a “racially repellent” group. ^[6] Jane Smiley writing in the Penguin Organic Lives of Dickens writes “We should not interpret him to the left-liberal we know today-he was racist, imperialist, sometimes antisemitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions. ^[7] An anthology of Dickens’ essays from Household Words“Women, the Irish, Chinese and Aborigines are described in biased, racist, stereotypical or otherwise than flattering terms …. We encourage you to work towards a more positive understanding of the history of the history of the world ^[8] 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. ^[9]

Authors Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, in their book Dickens in Context examines this jigsaw puzzle with the poor and the downcast. They argue that this is a nativist and “cultural chauvinist” in the sense of being highly ethnocentric and ready to justify. Robert Knox. That is, Dickens did not look at the behavior of races to be “fixed”; rather, its appeal to “civilization” suggests the possibility of alteration. However, “Dickens views of racial others, most fully developed in his fictional fiction, that he knew of the savages’ functioned as a handy foil against which British national identity could emerge.” ^[10]

The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature similarly notes that while Dickens praised middle-class values,

Dickens militancy on this catalog of virtues had nationalistic implications, since he praised these middle-class moral ideals as English national values. Conversely, he often stigmatized foreign cultures as lacking in these middle-class ideas, representing French, Italian, and American characters, in particular, as slothful and deceitful. His attitudes towards colonized peoples sometimes took place in these extremes. In the wake of the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, he wrote … “To be fair, Dickens did not support the antislavery movement. … and excoriated what he saw as English national vices ^[11]

William Oddie argues that Dickens’ racism “grew progressively more illiberal over the course of his career” particularly after the Indian rebellion. ^[12] Grace Moore, on the other hand, argues that Dickens, has a staunch abolitionist and opponent of imperialism, which has suggested that Dickens and Empire: ^[13] She suggests that overemphasizing Dickens’ racism obscures his continued commitment to the abolition of slavery. ^[14]Laurence Mazzeno has characterized 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.” ^[15]Others have observed that Dickens also denied suffrage to blacks, writing in a letter “Free of race he must be stupendous absurdity of making a vote to get rid of his roll of his eye”. ^[16] Bernard Porter suggests that Dickens’ race prejudice causes 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. ^[17]However, Dickens did not join other liberals in condemning Jamaica’s Governor 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-gold the native or the Devil ..” ^[5] : 971

In an essay on George Eliot , KM Newton notes:

Most of the major writers in the Victorian period can be seen as a greater or lesser degree. According to Edward Said, even Marx and Mill are not immune: ‘both of them seemed to have such ideas as liberty, representative government, and individual happiness must not be applied to the Orient for reasons that we would call racist’. In many of these writers antisemitism was the most obvious form of racism, and this continued beyond the Victorian period, as is evident in such figures as TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf. ^[18]

Fagin and Jews in Oliver Twist

One of the best known instances of racism is Dickens’ portrait of Fagin in one of his most widely read reads, Oliver Twist , first published in serial form between 1837 and 1839. as Dickens’ biographer Chesterton GK has argued against this notion. 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’ Fagin in Oliver Twist -the Jew who runs a school in London for child pickpockets-is widely seen as one of the most grotesque Jews in English literature. ^[19] The character is thought to be based on Ikey Solomon , a 19th-century Jewish criminal in London, who was interviewed by Dickens during the latter’s time as a journalist. ^[20] Nadia Valdman, who writes about the portrayal of Jews in literature , argues that Fagin’s representation was drawn from the image of the Jew as inherently evil, that the imagery associated with the Devil, and with beasts. ^[21] The Historical Encyclopedia of Anti-Semitismargues that the image of Fagin is “drawn from stage melodrama and medieval images”. Fagin is also seen as one of those young children in the life of crime, and one who can “disorder representational boundaries”. ^[9]

In 1854, the Jewish Chronicle asked 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 bought Dickens’ home in 1860 when he had written for Dickens in protest against his portrayal of 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. ^[22] Dickens had described his husband as “a Jewish moneylender,” but also someone he knew to be an honest gentleman.

Dickens was only really factual about the realities of street crime, showing them in their “squalid misery”, yet he was taking Mrs Davis’s complaint seriously. He halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text of the book, which is why Fagin is called “the Jew”. 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 samples of the best … “Davis feels Dickens a copy of the Hebrew Bible in gratitude. ^[19] 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 manners and body language he had included in earlier readings. ^[23]

Stage and screen adaptations

Joel Berkowitz reports that the earliest stage of adaptations of Oliver Twist “followed by an almost unrelieved procession of Jewish stage distortions, and even helped to popularize it to the stage of the Jews that lasted until 1914” ^[24]It is widely believed that the most antisemitic adaptation of Oliver Twist is David Lean ‘s movie of 1948 , with Alec Guinness as Fagin. Guinness was made-up to look like the illustrations from the novel’s first edition. The film’s release in the US was much delayed, and it was divided into two parts of Fagin’s scenes cut. This particular adaptation of the novel was banned in Israel. ^[25]Ironically, the film was also banned in Egypt for portraying Fagin too sympathetically. ^[26] When George Lucas’s movie Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace was released, he denied the claim that he was a hooked up trader Watto (who has a hooked nose) was a Faginesque Jewish stereotype. However, animator Rob Coleman later admited that he had seen Alec Guinness as Fagin in Oliver Twist to inspire his animators in creating Watto. ^[27]

The role of Fagin in Oliver Twist continues to be a challenge for actors in the post-Nazi era. Various Jewish writers, directors, and actors have searched for ways to “salvage” Fagin. In recent years, Jewish performers and writers have attempted to recapture Fagin as having been done with Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice . The composer of the musical 1960s Oliver! , Lionel Bart , was Jewish, and he wrote songs for the character with a Jewish rhythm and Jewish orchestration. ^[25] In spite of the musical’s Jewish provenance, Jewish playwright Julia Pascalbelieve that performing the show today is still inappropriate, an example of a minority acting on a stereotype to please a host society. Pascal says “US Jews are not exposed to the constant low-level anti-Semitism that filters through British society”. In contrast to Pascal, Yiddish expert David Schneider found the Dickens novel, where Fagin is simply “the Jew,” a difficult read, but saw Fagin in the musical as “a complex character” who was not “the baddie.” ^[25] Jewish stage producer Menachem Golan also created a lesser-known Hebrew musical of Oliver Twist . ^[28] Some recent actors who have portrayed Fagin’s Jewishness,heightened it while also making Fagin sympathetic. For Spall, Fagin is the first adult character in the story with actual warmth. He is a criminal, but is at least looking out for children more than the managers of Twist’s workhouse. Spall says “The fact is, even if you are to turn into a child of a child, it is something inherently sympathetic in Dickens’ writing,” I defy anyone to come away with anything other than warmth and pity for him. ” ^[29] Jewish actors Who-have portrayed Fagin on stage include Richard Kline , ^[30] Ron Moody in the Oscar-winning movie of the musical Oliver! , and Richard Dreyfuss in a Disney live action TV production .

Will Eisner’s 2003 graphic novel Fagin the Jew retells the story of Oliver Twist from Fagin’s perspective, both humanizing Fagin and making him authentically Jewish. ^[31]

Jewish filmmaker (and Holocaust survivor) Roman Polanski made a film adaptation of Oliver Twist in 2004. Concerning the portrait of Fagin in his film, Polanski said

“It’s still a Jewish stereotype but without going overboard.” He is not a Hassidic Jew, but he is not a Hassidic Jew. “What else could they do?” ^[32]

In the same interview, Polanski reluctantly notes that there are elements of Oliver Twist which echoes in the Nazi-occupied Poland. In reviewing the movie, Norman Lebrecht argues that many previous adaptations of Oliver TwistPolanski found a solution “several degrees more original and convincing than fudges”, noting that “Rachel Portman’s attractiveness is very important to the accompaniment of Jewish music” and that “Ben Kingsley endows the villain with tragic inevitability: a lonely old man, scrabbling for trinkets of security and a little human warmth “, concluding that” It was certainly Dickens’ final intention that ‘the Jew’ should be incidental in Oliver Twist and in his film Polanski has given the story has a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal. ” ^[23]

African Americans in American Notes

Dickens’ attitudes toward African Americans were also complex. In American Notes he proudly opposed the inhumanity of slavery in the United States , and expressed a desire for African American emancipation. However, Grace Moore has noted how to work in the same way, he has a grotesque description focused on the man’s dark complexion and way of movement, which to Dickens amounts to an “insane imitation of an English coachman “. ^[33]In 1868, in a letter to the then-uneducated condition of the black population in America, Dickens railed against “the melancholy absurdity of giving these people votes,” which “at any rate at present, would eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads. ” ^[33]

Native Americans in The Savage Noble

In his 1853 essay The Noble Savage , Dickens’ attitude towards Native Americans is one of condescending pity, tempered (in the interpretation of Grace Moore) ^[34] by a counterbalancing concern with the arrogance of European colonialism. The term ” noble savage ” was in circulation since the 17th century, but Dickens looks at it as an absurd oxymoron. He advocated that savages be civilized “off the face of the earth”. In The Noble Savage , Ridiculous Dickens the philosophical exaltation of an idyllic primitive man living in greater harmony with nature, an idea prevalent in what is called ” romantic primitivism ” (often erroneously attributed to Rousseau). Dickens rather all the superiority of European culture and civilization, while denouncing savages as murderous. Dickens was a response to painter George Catlin ‘s exhibit of Native American paintings (referred to by both Catlin and Dickens as “Indians”) when it visited England. Catlin, he allegedly, misguidedly exalted the so-called “noble savage”. Dickens maintained the natives were dirty, cruel, and constantly fighting. Dickens’ satire on Catlin and others like him who might find something to admire in the American native or African Bushmen is a notable turning point in the history of the use of the phrase. ^[35] At the conclusion of the essay, he argues that the virtues of mythology and the way of life are poor and doomed, but still remain unfulfilled. Gold Shakespeare. ”

Grace Moore in Dickens and Empire This article is a transitional piece for Dickens. She sees Dickens’ earlier writings as it’s marked by a swing between conflicting opinions on race. The essay Noble Savage is a new beginning, but concludes with a plea for kindness, while at the same time Dickens settles into a more stereotyped form of thinking, engaging in sweeping generalizations about people he had never encountered Earlier in writings Such as in His review of Narrative of the Niger Expedition. Finally, Moore notes that Dickens is in the same essay, and he is one of the most influential people in the world. ^{[13] : 68-70}

Professor Sian Griffiths has noted that Dickens’ essay exhibits many of the same uncivil qualities he attributes to savages and writes:

“Dickens over-simplified defamation of Native American and African tribes seems to be more likely to be over-simplified. fault of failing to see the complexity of each individual human character. ” ^[36]

Inuit in The Frozen Deep

Dickens in collaboration with Wilkie Collins , wrote The Deep Frozen , which premiered in 1856, an allegorical play about the missing Arctic Franklin expedition , and which attacked the character of the Inuit as covetous and cruel. The purpose of the play was to discredit John Rae ‘s report on the fate of the expedition, which concluded that the crew had turned to cannibalism, and was based largely on Inuit testimonies. Dickens initially had a positive assessment of the Inuit. The earlier Dickens, writing in “Our Phantom Ship on an Antediluvian Cruise”, wrote about the Inuit as “gentle loving savages”, but after The Times published a report byJohn Rae of the Inuit discovery of the remains of the lost Franklin expedition with evidence that the crew resorted to cannibalism , Dickens reversed his stand. Dickens, in addition to Franklin’s Widow, refused to accept the report and accused the Inuk of being liars, getting involved on Lady Franklin’s side in an extended conflict with John Rae over the exact cause of the demise of the expedition. Lady Franklin wrote that the white Englishman could do no better exploring the wilderness and was considered able to “survive anywhere” and “to triumph over any adversity through faith, scientific objectivity, and superior spirit.” ^[37]Dickens not only tried to discredit Rae and the Inuit, but accused the Inuit of Franklin’s end. In “The Lost Arctic Voyagers”, he wrote “It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages from their deferential behavior to the white man while he is strong. the white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and sprung upon him. ” Exploring John Rae disputed with Dickens in two rebuttals (also published in Household Words). Rae defended the Inuit as “a bright example to civilized people” and compared them favorably to the undisciplined crew of Franklin. Keal writes that Rae was no match for “Dickens the story teller”, one of Lady Franklin’s “powerful friends”, ^[38] to the English he was a Scot who was not “pledged to the patriotic, empire-building aims of the military. ” ^[39] He was shunned by the English establishment as a result of his writing the report. Modern historians have vindicated Rae’s belief that the Franklin crew resorted to cannibalism, ^[40]having already been decimated by scurvy and starvation; furthermore they were poorly prepared for wilderness survival to Lady Hamilton’s prejudices. in the play, the Rae is a suspicious, power-hungry nursemaid who predicted the expedition’s doom in her effort to ruin the happiness of the heroine. ^[37]

Reconciliation

During the filming of the 2008 Canadian documentary Passage , Gerald Dickens , Charles’ great-great grandson was introduced to explain “why such a great champion of the underdog had sided with the establishment”. Dickens’ insult of the Inuit , Tagak Curleyan Inuit statesman said to Gerald, “Your grandfather insulted my people. Orkney historian Tom Muir is reported to have described Curley as “furious” and “properly upset”. Gerald then apologized on behalf of the Dickens family, which Curley accepted on behalf of the Inuit people. Muir describes this as a “historic moment”. ^[38]

Indians in The Perils of Certain English Prisoners

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is an early work of fiction co-authored by Dickens and Wilkie Collins dealing allegorically with the Indian Rebellion of 1857 . Patrick Brantlinger looks melodramatic and wildly inaccurate. It appeared in the 1857 Christmas number of Household Words . ^[41] In Perils Dickens describes the “native Sambo “, a paradigm of the Indian mutineers, ^[42] as a “double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain” who takes part in a massacre of women and children allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre . ^[43]Dickens was much incensed by the massacre in which over a hundred English prisoners, most of the women and children, were killed, and on 4 October 1857 Dickens wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts : “I wish I was the Commander in Chief in India …. I should do my utmost to exterminate the race on the head of the cruelties rested … proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth. ” ^[44] Lillian Nayder has noted that Dickens Collaborator, Wilkie Collins, lacked his hostility to the Indian people, nor faulted them for the mutiny to the degree that Dickens did. In Collins own work A Sermon for the Sepoys, he preaches to the Indian mutineers from an Indian sacred text, not a Christian one. Collins disassociates himself from Dickens privately expressed desire to exterminate the Indian race, but instead appeals to their capacity for moral goodness. Moreover, Collins’ famous novel The Moonstone suggests that it is really the Indians who were mainly at the defensive during the mutiny, not the British, contrary to the prevalent impression given by the British press. ^[45]

Grace Moore observes that after a similar uprising in Jamaica , Dickens did not exhibit the same level of fury as he did towards the Indians in the Sepoy Rebellion. She attributes this to Dickens’ greater awareness of the brutal actions of British soldiers towards native in their colonies, and suggests that Dickens now regretted his attitude. In taking this position, he directly argues against the views of Patrick Bratlinger and William Oldie. However, Moore notes that while Dickens has become more aware of the unethical actions of British colonialists and how they provided a motivation for local rebellion, Dickens never lost his sense that he was nothing desirable about the life-style of foreign peoples, though^{[13] : Chapter 6}

References