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That Orwell should have come, sooner or later, to Dickens is not surprising. No one educated in the English language can entirely avoid Dickens, like him or not. What is rather remarkable is that Orwell does like him, a fact for which Orwell offers several excuses without providing much of an explanation.

Though each was characteristic of his own century, the symmetry of Orwell's life and Dickens's is very striking. Orwell begins, as he describes it, as a member of the "lower upper-middle class." Dickens's family—armed services and petty bureaucrats—is on the lower margin of the middle class. At first Dickens falls and Orwell rises, but in both cases they are uncomfortable.

Orwell, in private school and then at Eton, felt acutely that he was snubbed and despised for being above himself. Young Dickens, sent to work pasting labels on bottles, though by his own account equal to the work, suffered from the reverse-snobbery of the other boys who called him "the young gentleman" and teased him. In each case some evidence suggests the boy exaggerated affronts and stings that would have been shrugged off, if noticed at all, by less sensitive boys.

Orwell says young Dickens experienced "an atmosphere of struggling poverty," yet Dickens had more experience with the fear of poverty than with poverty itself. The family had better days while Dickens was younger, for he had sometimes a tutor and some time in the country. But soon after Dickens was sent to work, his father was committed to debtors' prison. To us, the downward course of the family's finances is very evident, but to the child the low point was a shock. In truth, it was more a matter of social embarrassment than of privation. Dickens's mother chose to join her husband in prison. There conditions were good enough that the family employed a servant, and Charles—boarded out to a relative—breakfasted with the family who seem never to have been in want of the animal necessities. The family was rescued from this not-after-all-so-piteous situation by a legacy, yet they did not allow Charles to rejoin them for sometime, and then only grudgingly. His father's mismanagement and his mother's rejection, Charles neither forgot nor forgave.

Most likely his feelings of rejection served to exaggerate in memory whatever degree of social rejection there was in the blacking shop—at all events Dickens's account of his one proletarian experience is possibly the most pathetic thing he ever wrote. Yet, one cannot read it without thinking that to his fellows in the shop Dickens must have appeared the perfect twerp. Orwell never manages to hit this nail, though he scars the lumber all around it. Orwell ought to know how Dickens would appear to the other boys, but Orwell had enjoyed his boyhood companions from the lower classes until they were forbidden, lest—as Michael Shelden, the authorized biographer puts it—he become careless about pronouncing his aitches.

Dickens's adult career was altogether appropriate for a middle class man of letters: office work, bureaucracy, minor journalism. As soon as Dickens tried his hand at anything like fiction he became a prodigious success, and singular among literary prodigies, Dickens remained prolific and successful his whole long life. Orwell on the other hand, did not achieve much in the way of financial independence except in the last five years of his short life. Their common ground is their deep resentment at injustice and their pity for the poor. Upon this common ground—and Orwell's longstanding interest in popular literature—Orwell examines Dickens.

First Orwell must say that both sham socialists and Catholic apologists have tried to claim Dickens. That such people admire Dickens is no recommendation. What is more, Krupskaya has denounced Dickens as "hopelessly middle class." Orwell knows, perhaps as well as she does, Krupskaya's reasons for saying so, and he knows as she cannot the truth that underlies the reasons.

Orwell ought to dislike Dickens, knows he ought to dislike Dickens, but likes him nonetheless. What Orwell likes, however, he approaches in the role of advocatus diaboli, and so we are treated to a rather full—if rambling—bill of particulars against Dickens, and only here and there is any concession offered to mitigating factors.

Dickens is an ineffectual social critic. Of this there can be no doubt. English education hardly gets off lightly in Dickens's work—for the bad schools and bad masters stick in the mind and the good example of Dr. Strong and his institution is vague and evanescent. Yet, as Orwell will show again in Such, Such Were the Joys, hardly anything has improved, and indeed Dickens's Creakle is in Orwell's day crammed down little throats by yet another generation of Creakles.

So it is with all the institutions and types of persons Dickens has attacked—no one recognizes himself in Dickens, though the picture be clear enough, or one who sees Dickens's point has made a joke of it (not so surprising because the bitter irony that English critics call satire is really sarcasm, which modern writers know to be ineffective when applied too freely). Orwell's thesis would not have been served if he had noted some progress in the matter of child labor, but it is little enough and perhaps owes more to the rise in unemployment than to anything Dickens has written.

Dickens is not a revolutionary "in the ordinary sense." He has sensed something wrong at the root of society, but he has no programme, and no real sense that a programme is necessary. Orwell really seems to think that Dickens, who it is admitted seldom got beneath the surface of anything, ought to have anticipated Marx or at the very least should have seen the French revolution as a structural necessity rather than, as portrayed in Tale of Two Cities, the deplorable result of appalling—and avoidable—aristocratic abuses.

As Orwell reads Dickens, that revolution need not have come about, and no others need come about if only those on top will behave decently. Dickens is a moralist—which is nearly the most damning charge a socialist can tender—and Dickens's moral is: "If men would behave decently the world would be decent."

To a good socialist, this is heresy at the very least. But Orwell proclaims it "not the platitude it sounds." He is very obviously flirting with the idea. The simple and imperfect answer here is that Orwell is not a very good socialist. This answer has occurred to Victor Gollancz who has pointed out, in introducing The Road to Wigan Pier, "Mr. Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism."

Indeed, whatever Orwell does mean by socialism is clearly at odds with what ninety-nine of a hundred people who call themselves socialists think it means. He does not mean the cult of Russia; he does not mean idolatry at the altar of the New Tractors; he does not mean the liturgy of stilted, stultifying Marxist tract rhetoric. If, in advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, he has blurred the idea of proletariat until it encompasses all of the poor and oppressed, at least he does understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat is actually beyond his capacity to comprehend—which puts him far ahead of the sloganeers and parlor pinks. It may be taken for granted that where Gollancz squawked the louder, there history has proven Orwell more nearly correct.

Orwell suspects that he is near to Dickens, even as he reviews Dickens's shortcomings.

Dickens cannot draw a proletarian character; Steven Blackpool is a class traitor, the union organizer Slackbridge is an exploiter, and otherwise we have a few servants, many of whom are comic or more servile than is becoming even in a servant. But where has Orwell done better. So long as he sticks to the heart of the working class, the people "who make the wheels go round," he does not do better, and he knows he cannot. With marginal people—the lumpenproletarians—both Dickens and Orwell have more success.

What character of Dickens's is more Dickensian than Mrs. Booker of Wigan Pier (Mrs. F. of the Diary)—Mrs. Booker who has eaten herself into invalidism and who calculates as she lays in the kitchen how much longer a cancerous tenant, whose life she has insured, may live—or Boris or a half a dozen others of Down and Out in Paris and London. Would Fagin have been so out of place on the sham Bolshevik committee who say they want a football column from Orwell. Whether Orwell has meant his portraits from life to have their Dickensian flavor, whether he has noticed the likeness himself, he certainly knows that others see it, for the Times Literary Supplement has pointed it out in reviewing Down and Out in Paris and London, and Orwell takes his notices to heart.

Although some parts of Down and Out in Paris and London are fictions meant to unite observations from disparate times and circumstances, Orwell has insisted that these persons actually existed and were as he described them, and he has his diary to support Wigan Pier. Anyone who has moved among this class will know that it would have been pointless for Orwell—had he done so—to invent or to embellish such a character as Bozo, the pavement artist, for there is in this class no dearth of real persons at least as unlikely, at least as peculiar, at least as unexpected, and at least as triumphant and pathetic.

Dickens had found himself in rather the opposite situation; the whole of the preface of the first cheap edition of Oliver Twist is devoted to asserting that Jacob's Island, which he presented in fiction, is a real place. Although Dickens's pity for the poor is thoroughgoing, remarkably hardheaded and free of drawing-room altruism, he never quite overcomes his distaste for people of low circumstances. It is a distaste of visceral urgency, both as real and as chimerical as the smell of the lower classes to which Orwell devoted a long passage of Wigan Pier. As Orwell points out, Pip cannot accept a legacy, though itself honestly acquired, from a man who was once a criminal. The money smells.

Dickens was probably constitutionally unable to do as Orwell did; he could not have tramped around London in beggar's clothes or slept over a tripe shop. Dickens's higher characters are all surface, are cardboard, are static, are so hollow that excepting David Copperfield, the writer, not one of them works, though some of them have professions. His aristocrats are music hall stereotypes, buffoons and idiots. He has observed people of his own class, but the beggars, whores, and thieves he has seen.

This is the genius of Dickens, that he can draw such people so well without having lived among them. Next to him Orwell and anyone who has had experiences like Orwell's are merely draughtsmen. How can Dickens know them as he does upon no better experience than his few short years of journalism. Against Dickens it can be said that he seems almost always to try to make these characters as wicked as they could be made. This, he explains, is his attempt to counter the romantic humbug of the merry rogue and the jolly band of thieves—although he cannot say so, he knows not every whore has a heart of gold. Unfortunately, time has not treated his intention well—perhaps it is because his rogues have blood in their veins, perhaps it is the way his melodrama strikes modern ears, perhaps it is they have become too familiar to remain fearful: his villains of this class are now sometimes remembered, though they end miserably, precisely as merry rogues and jolly thieves.

For someone who obviously loved his own work well, Dickens has little regard for the work of others. Orwell notes, as I have hinted, that Dickens seems to have no idea what his characters do at work. At least as telling as Orwell sees it, is that the happiest of Dickensian happy endings involves retirement to a country seat with an extended family "all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters," and otherwise living a life of utter idleness. Dickens must think that all, save himself, hate their work and given the means would soon be free of it. And it is "given the means," for this happiest of endings cannot be saved up from earnings, but comes only through a deus ex machina—perhaps a benevolence from one of the rich men who has decided to behave decently.

In Coketown Dickens would seem to have grasped something of the meaning of the machine age: the regularity of the buildings, Gradgrind's facts and facts and facts, the soulless things of mass production. He sees in the steam piston "the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness." But he has no idea how the mills work or of who works in them.

Dickens has not connected the ideas of idleness and of machines, but Orwell has. In Dickens's day men fed machines, and did so still in Orwell's time. Yet Orwell believes he foresees a day when machines will feed on men—that is, when they will nearly wholly replace human labor and enforce idleness on everyone. Idleness is not the goal that Dickens thinks it is, and most who profess Marx have gone wrong in the same way, depicting the workers' paradise as hardly distinguishable from the Biblical one.

If Orwell does not know Marx better—although I think he does—at least he has learned it is not from work that the working class suffers. Indeed, out of work they suffer for the lack of it almost as much as they suffer for lack of the wages it would supply. Nothing Orwell urges in Wigan Pier against the immediate danger of fascism has quite the genuine passion of his warnings against the ultimate foe: the machine.

Naturally we will fight fascism, win or lose, but the horror of the machine is we will give the machine our humanity freely and be glad to be rid of it. The working class, already alienated from the product of their labor, will at last be alienated even from the labor. Big Brother is a machine, but that Orwell has not made more of this theme must be that he can see no way to improve upon Aldous Huxley's dystopic vision.

Well, if Dickens is not a revolutionary "in the ordinary sense," in what sense is he a revolutionary? This is a point Orwell cannot finesse. Dickens is a moral revolutionary. If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

So Dickens is a moralist after all. This would not be so bad, except—and very transparently—what Orwell says of Dickens he suspects of himself, and perhaps more than suspects. Here is a glimpse of the awful ambivalence Orwell conceals by confession in Wigan Pier. "The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another"—as much in Orwell's conscience as in society: you cannot change human nature unless you change the system, yet it is no use changing the system unless you have changed human nature. (Animal Farm has been forming in Orwell's mind since he was in Spain.)

Orwell's dilemma is ours, of course. Who could not let go of the cult of Russia, embrace it now at the bottom of the sea. Where was the altar of the New Tractors is now the Golden Arches. The socialists as socialists are gone, if there ever were any outside of Orwell's catalogue of cranks: "fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, `Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist." As cranks they survive, and some of them, prevailing, are no longer cranks. Orwell, old Eeyore of the left, has written that the revolutionaries and the moralists tend to alternate. The revolutionaries gone, perhaps it is the moralists' turn again. And what Orwell found in Dickens the moralist is this:

When Dickens shows us something that is wrong—though we may forget in a moment—we still can recognize that it is wrong. When Dickens draws a noble deed, we do even yet know that it is noble. Even the most wicked among us must recall, if distantly, that there is decency when Dickens presents it, and if men would behave decently the world would be decent.

It is little to hope upon, but it is what we have got.