Conservatives today generally cringe when literary criticism turns into political debate—or hectoring, for the Left commands the discussion, with its obligatory reduction of great poems, plays, and novels to their unspeakable racist, sexist, and class-bound assumptions. When the conversation turns to Charles Dickens (1812-1870), however, politics implicit or explicit is unavoidable. As George Orwell declared, in the celebrated opening sentence of his 1939 essay "Charles Dickens," "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing."
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