Stickin' up for Dickens

No wonder disabled people don't like Dickens.

In the interests of goodwill to all, and given that it's nearly Christmas, I want to speak up for old Charlie. Without Dickens, we probably wouldn't have the Christmas we all know, and that many of us love. By 1843, when "A Christmas Carol" was published, the old customs were in decline. But Dickens loved Christmas, and he reinvented Yuletide celebration in his annual Christmas stories.

Dickens wrote that the Christmas season is "a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys". His books and stories are full of pictures of seasonal celebration, relaxation, feasting, and goodwill to all. He would undoubtedly have hated the materialism and commercialism of contemporary Christmas in the West. Remember that "A Christmas Carol" is itself a morality tale about the meanness of the rich.

Most of his books were published in monthly episodes for an eager public and were very much the soap operas of their day. But Dickens was also a reforming novelist who challenged nineteenth century industrial conditions, the rapacity of Victorian capitalism, and the hypocrisy of the ruling class. Read "Hard Times", if you don't believe me.

Tiny Tim was emblematic of thousands of Victorian children who suffered from rickets or other diseases of poverty and malnourishment. Dickens' intention was to promote social reform and charitable giving and fellowship. His own early adulthood had been miserable and impoverished, and he was outraged at the conditions of the urban working classes, to which many of his readers were oblivious.

Of course, there's a lot wrong with Dickens too; his sentimentality, the improbable coincidences in his plots, and those exaggerated stereotypes. But he was able to learn from his mistakes and was willing to respond to criticism. In 1849, a Mrs Jane Seymour Hill wrote to him to complain about the character of Miss Mowcher, a person of restricted growth, who appeared in early episodes of David Copperfield. Jane was a disabled woman who lived near Dickens and suspected, correctly, that he had modelled Miss Mowcher on his observations of her. She complained: "I have suffered long and much from my personal deformities, but never before at the hands of a man so highly gifted as Charles Dickens". According to the America doctor James Gamble, who first uncovered this early example of disability activism around cultural imagery, she even threatened legal action.

Dickens wrote back to Jane Hill: "I am most exceedingly and unfeigningly sorry to have been the unfortunate occasion of giving you a moment's distress". He then developed the character in a more positive direction as the story unfolded in future episodes. Later, in "Our Mutual Friend", Dickens created Jenny Wren - who has scoliosis and restricted growth - as a three-dimensional and positive character who overcomes both social and physical adversity.

Perhaps you're not convinced. Perhaps you think that the disability sins of Dickens outweigh the delights of his writing, or you mistrust the sincerity of his penitence. But by rejecting Dickens, you're missing out on the greatest soap opera writer in the English language, a man who also had a strong social conscience and a real sense of comedy. And if you can't be sentimental at Christmas, when can you be? Let's be charitable - nobody's perfect.

God bless Mr Charles Dickens! God bless us every one!