Racism in the work of Charles Dickens

While Dickens was known to be highly sympathetic to the plight of the poor and disadvantaged in British society, like many other authors of the period he expressed attitudes in his journalism and works which have been interpreted as racist and xenophobic.

Dickens scholar Priti Joshi, for example, maintains that he never advocated any form of scientific racism in his works, but held extreme antipathy for non-European peoples, and steadfastly believed in their assimilation into Western culture.

In a private letter to Emily de la Rue, Dickens wrote the following passage on Indians: "You know faces, when they are not brown; you know common experiences when they are not under turbans; Look at the dogs – low, treacherous, murderous, tigerous villains."

He also asserted that "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 was decent and benign in the previous century.

"[5] According to Ackroyd, Dickens did not believe that the Union in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the Confederacy for that reason.

[6] Jane Smiley, in her Penguin Lives biography of Dickens, writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal we know today – he was racist, imperialist, sometimes antisemitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions".

"[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.

"[14] Others have observed that Dickens also opposed granting voting rights to African Americans, writing in a letter "Free of course he must be; but the stupendous absurdity of making him a voter glares out of every roll of his eye".

[15] Bernard Porter suggests that Dickens' racism caused 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.

According to Edward Said, even Marx and Mill are not immune: 'both of them seemed to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representative government, and individual happiness must not be applied to the Orient for reasons that today we would call racist'.

Paul Vallely wrote in The Independent that Dickens's Fagin in Oliver Twist—the Jew who runs a school in London for child pickpockets—is regularly seen as one of the most grotesque Jewish characters in English literature.

[19] Nadia Valdman, who specialises in the portrayal of Jewish people in literature, argues that Fagin's representation was drawn from images of Jews created by non-Jews as "inherently evil" as associated with the Devil and beasts.

Dickens protested that he was merely being factual about the realities of street crime in London in his depiction of criminals in their "squalid misery", yet he took Mrs Davis's complaint seriously; he halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him.

[25] When George Lucas's film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace was released, he denied the claim made by some critics that the unscrupulous trader Watto (who has a hooked nose) was a Faginesque Jewish stereotype.

In his review of the film, Norman Lebrecht argues that many previous adaptations of Oliver Twist have merely avoided the problem, but that Polanski found a solution "several degrees more original and convincing than previous fudges", noting that "Rachel Portman's attractive score studiously underplays the accompaniment of Jewish music to Jewish misery" and also 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 a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal.

[32] After the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was passed, Dickens wrote a letter in 1868 which alluded to the lack of education amongst newly emancipated African Americans, criticising "the melancholy absurdity of giving these people votes", which "at any rate at present, would glare out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads".

In the essay, Dickens ridiculed the philosophical exaltation of an idyllic primitive man living in greater harmony with nature, an idea prevalent in what is called "romantic primitivism" (often attributed to Rousseau).

Dickens's satire on Catlin and others like him who might find something to admire in the Native Americans or African tribesmen is considered by some to be a notable turning point in the history of the use of the phrase.

[34] At the conclusion of the essay, note as he argues that although the virtues of the savage are mythical and his way of life inferior and doomed, he still "deserves to be treated no differently than if he were an Englishman of genius, such as Newton or Shakespeare."

The essay Noble Savage itself has an aggressive 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 generalisations about peoples he had never encountered, in a way he avoided doing in earlier writings such as in his review of Narrative of the Niger Expedition.

Moore notes that, in the same essay, Dickens is critical of many aspects of British society, and indirectly suggests that these issues must be fixed before Britons can start criticising others.

But by embracing the extreme opposing opinion, Dickens ultimately commits the same fault of failing to see the complexity of each individual human's character.Dickens, in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, wrote The Frozen Deep, 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 explorer 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.

Lady Franklin maintained that the ship's crew, being Englishmen, could not possibly make a mistake during their expedition and were considered able to "survive anywhere" and "to triumph over any adversity through faith, scientific objectivity, and superior spirit".

Keal writes that Rae was no match for "Dickens the story teller", one of Lady Franklin's "powerful friends",[37] to many in England he was a Scotsman who was not "pledged to the patriotic, empire-building aims of the military.

Modern historians have vindicated Rae's belief that the Franklin crew resorted to cannibalism,[39][40] having already been decimated by scurvy and starvation; furthermore they were poorly prepared for wilderness survival, contrary to Lady Hamilton's prejudices.