Poverty of thought

Remember that business a little while back about Dickens being opposed to the abolitionist movement? (Quick refresher course here if you don't.)

When I wrote about this before, all I had available was Tim Cavanaugh's blog post on the topic, not his original full-length article from Reason magazine. However, that full-length article is now online in all its, er, glory. Be aware that it contains spoilers about several Dickens novels.

I was hoping that maybe the article would be better than the blog post that followed it up. I figured that Cavanaugh would have had more room in the article to explain where he was coming from, so that his conclusions, strange though they were, would at least be revealed to have some sort of foundation.

In fact, the article explains his point of view even less than the blog post does.

George Mason University economist David M. Levy has tracked some of Dickens’ creepier predilections, including his curious hatred of the anti-slavery movement. “Dickens is attacking classical economics from the right,” Levy says. “But right-wing attacks on markets are very popular on the left.”

That's it. That's the only paragraph on the abolitionist movement. I'm not kidding. No "here's why Levy and I think Dickens hated the anti-slavery movement"; just "he hated it, period."

I guess when a man's been dead for more than a century, it's considered acceptable to slander him.

There's also a lot of complaining about how, in Dickens's books (most of which he seems to remember inaccurately), rich people are, well, rich, and how we usually don't find out how they got rich, and how that shows that Dickens believed "that the wealth just somehow exists and needs only to get to the right people."

This, Cavanaugh tells us, is "a boom-time mentality," of little value during an economic recession. But if our thinkers and analysts are this hard up for good, in-depth analysis, we're in a far worse recession than just the economic one.

Comments

[Emma M.]

Isn't that kind of the point of rich people in Dickens' work, though? Speaking as someone who has only read "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Little Dorrit' (and about 40 pages of "Our Mutual Friend"), the wealthy characters in his novels have gotten that way through unknown means and, therefore, the people who idolize them are even more ridiculous. I mean, Mr. Merdle wouldn't be half as intimidating if we knew exactly how he became so rich and powerful. What frightens us about Merdle is that he's rich and powerful because he did this one thing a long time ago that no one remembers (or seems to care about) and that led to him knowing a guy who knew a guy who is the cousin twice removed of this really influential guy in Parliament, or some other such nonsense. The fact that these people (like Merdle or the Barnacles or just about any French aristocrat in A.T.o.T.C) have so much money and influence and no one knows how they got it or where it came from is supposed to prove Dickens' point that people are so oblivious to what is going on and the actions of those in power, like his theories on "Nobody", where he says people refuse to take responsibility for the problems in their own country/government/society and call said problems "Nobody's Fault".

Then again, I haven't read the article; I was just going off your post. And sorry for the rant =)

[Gina]

No apologies necessary -- you've made some excellent points!