Dickensian Thoughts

"Orwell wrote of Dickens as ‘a man who is always fighting against something but who fights in the open and is not frightened...a man who is generously angry...a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls,’" quotes Peter Hitchens — Smelly Little Orthodoxies.

"Dickens was convinced that a line of thought which elevated self-interest as the mainspring of human action was, though it paraded in the upbeat slogan of ’the greatest happiness for the greatest number,’ bound to cause suffering at some level, as in the operation of the adjusted Poor Laws, or… the inflicting of psychological and moral damage on individuals and communities," writes Vincent Newey, quoted by Stephan Hand — Dickens v. The Malthusians.