For the defense …

… The campaign to smear novelist Charles Dickens as a racist - World Socialist Web Site. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The projection back in time of prevailing middle class values, the view that “all one has to do is to attribute the thoughts, feelings and motives of present-day men to the past,” in Georg Lukacs’ phrase, is one of the most intellectually debilitating and counter-productive efforts imaginable. The contemporary petty bourgeois, offended by Dickens’ occasional backwardness and prejudice, much of it expressed privately, remains immune to the novelist’s deep, deep feelings for the crushed and oppressed present in his novels, because he or she has no such feelings. He or she has sensitivities, and identity issues, and enormous quantities of self-regard and self-pity. The problems of the great mass of the population are of no great interest—more than that, such problems, of a vast, life-and-death character, and the human beings whom they press forward, threaten to push the self-important middle class out of the spotlight and off the social and intellectual stage completely.