Ah wikipedia

[pasithea]

When I was younger I really liked Dickens. His resentment of his mother, his bleak writings on the appalling conditions of workers. It mirrored parts of my childhood well enough to find some strange kinship with it (though my life was far easier than any of his characters)

Someone else mentioned the new upcoming version of "A Christmas Carol" (which IMO is one of Dicken's weakest works) and made reference to Scrooge suggesting he might be a stereotype of a jew. So I felt a need to jump to his defense. I knew Dickens to be a man who was keenly aware of the plight of the impoverished classes and that he'd found difficulty in visiting the US because he was an abolitionist as well.

Interesting to discover that he also took a lot of interest in the Unitarian church though he remained anglican and did a bunch of other things. Not all of them were good. His ideas of what was needed to help and support women was in fact pretty goddamned fucked up, but I'm pretty sure his intent was not racist. Even by modern standards I think he'd come across as fairly liberal.

The other point of interest in wikipedia was in learning just how good a writer he wasn't. Scholars believe that Ebenezer Scrooge was based off one John Elwes and that guy...

Wow... I never felt like Scrooge was a particularly bad guy when I was a child, but reading about Elwes, I feel really bad for him. It seems he was very mentally ill. I'm wondering if he wasn't schizophrenic or had Tourettes or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Elwes_(politician)

Edit: Ah. Here's a section worth reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens#Allegations_of_anti-semitism_and_racism Pleh. A fine example of how blind I was when I was younger. Happily at least it seems that none of these stereotypes seem to have stuck with me. I always pictured these characters as being like the assholes I knew (who were all Christian) The few jewish people I knew when I was a child were really nice people.

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

I never thought that Scrooge was supposed to be a Jewish stereotype - since Fagin is, and that Fagin's religion gets mentioned that much, really suggests that Dickens never intended for Scrooge to be that.

I think with Fagin it was just an easily accessible stereotype, and since Dickens was noticeably agreeable to reader input, as soon as he realized some of his readers were actual Jews and cranky about the stereotyping, he quickly changed his tune. And the "I think the entire population of India needs to be murdered" thing just sounds like anyone angry and lashing out.

I'm sure that Dickens had his prejudices, but everything else about him suggests that he wasn't a sincere bigot, so I figure he just had some basic Victorian societal assumptions.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Dickens took her complaint seriously. He halted the printing of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not been set, which is why Fagin is called the Jew 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him. In his next novel, Our Mutual Friend, he created the character of Riah (meaning "friend" in Hebrew), whose goodness, Vallely writes, is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as samples of the best ..." Davis sent Dickens a copy of the Hebrew bible in gratitude.[58]

I find this interesting. Seems he had a casual prejudice that he was simply not aware of, and went to great effort to try and correct when he had it pointed out to. On the other hand there's also his view of Eskimos and Indians...

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I'm like 1/16th native american and I chew my nails and given half a chance, I'd bite the heads off a few annoying protestants that I can think of. Perhaps he was on to something with that whole cannibalism thing.

(For the love of all that is holy please may no one interpret this comment as anything other than black comedy)

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Bet I can fit 1/16th of you in my mouth.

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Damn, John Elwes doesn't even stoke my classicist rage. Guy wasn't greedy, he was inbred English upper class, seriously broken in his concept of money. It's sort of tragic when someone doesn't realize that the value of money is what it affords you, not the money itself. And I kind of have to like him after his response to being shot in the face. Very glib.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Oh hey. I ran into this. It has nothing to do with Dickens or antisemitism but it does have glowing mushrooms.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/photogalleries/glowing-mushrooms-pictures/index.html

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

It's important with someone like Dickens that attitudes about Jews and what we would call 'racism' now was simply a product of the time. It's quite possible to sincerely love someone from the past, and forgive them their failures to be tolerant by modern standards because that would have been basically impossible culturally for them.

People were more racist in the past, hell, lots of people are still pretty racist now and I can't just dismiss hundreds of years of great art because their authors were part of the cultural standards of their times.

[hairypolack.livejournal.com]

" every one thinks that Ebenezer Scrooge is

well hes not, but guess who is?

All 3 stooges!"