Status Updates From Charles Dickens

"Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. "If men would behave decently the world would be decent" is not such a platitude as it sounds."

"If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A "change of heart" is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo."

"The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another."

"The revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded savages—in fact, as lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious imaginative intensity. He describes them dancing the "Carmagnole,""

Okay, I'm seeing Tales of Two Cities in a new light.

" if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious."

"And so far as social criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this, unless one deliberately reads meanings into him."

I gotta read more of Dickens. I like this criticism.

"Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few by-laws and abolish a few anomalies." I'M CRYING, MAN