Anyone who has read A Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist, or seen the musicals, knows that Charles Dickens was a Communist, at least as defined by today’s Republican Party. (Broadly, to the breaking point.) But did you know he also hated America? And that his writings might provoke exactly the kind of “discomfort, guilt, or anguish” over our nation’s racial history that legislators in Florida—and elsewhere—are trying to expunge from school libraries and classrooms?
I discovered this only recently while making my way through all 700-plus pages of his sixth novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. The book—not his best, but entertaining, with a pair of memorable villains—is partly set in the United States and was written between 1842 and 1843, not long after Dickens had returned from a six-month trip to North America.
