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

[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.