Charles Dickens was not a nice man. He was horrid to his family, remarking on the birth of one of his sons that ‘on the whole I could have dispensed with him.’ When he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior, he threw his long-suffering wife out, and sent her only three letters in the 12 remaining years of his life. Despite having one of the best imaginations in English literature, his depictions of women alternated between terrible crone (Miss Havisham) to simply prone (Esther in Bleak House). Ah well, we used to say: terrible man, brilliant books. Funny old place, the past.
Well, times have changed. Specifically, the cause has changed. If nobody much was agonised by Dickens the terrible misogynist and child-disparager, then – thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement – they have suddenly become keenly upset by his racism. Which, these days, means reaching for the can of spray paint.
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