Near the end of this novella length essay, Orwell writes that anyone who loves Dickens and has read this essay is probably now angry at him - Orwell, that is. Orwell has spent the essay incisively demonstrating how Dickens's biases, biographical and ideological, shaped his literary output. Sympathizing with the poor, yet alienated from both industrial and agricultural labor as a member of the rising urban bourgeoisie, Dickens doggedly attacked institutional cruelties of his day yet had no alternative societal vision besides that men should act better towards one another. He was a moralizer par excellence, but lacked imaginative vision and thus had no comprehension of how progressive societal change could fundamentally alter that which he found so distasteful. In addition he feared mass popular action and associated it with the savage cruelty of the ill-educated mob.

Thus we see why both conservatives and progressives have found strands in Dickens to steal from.

I'm prepared to admit the case, and bear Orwell no ill feeling for arguing it so well. Dickens certainly had weaknesses, but his literary strengths... my goodness, those strengths. The man wrote a beautiful page with a mastery of language and phrase, and Orwell is prepared to acknowledge such. For me Dickens's glittering language strengths (usually) easily counteract his problematic aspects in plot, character and vision. ( )

There is a battered but beloved kinship between Orwell and Dickens, the edges of which I had previously encountered. This frontal approach was very evenhanded, often critical and yet an homage in a full sense of the term. This isn't Orwell's survey of the oeuvre but rather a pellucid portrait of what Dickens isn't. The chief absence is one of action or work in the Dickens world. It is difficult to argue with a man show through the neck in Spain. There is a strange sense in the book in where Orwell that Dickens suffers from excessive detail and then poignantly notes that such will leave images imprinted in the reader for life. The sinuous convoluted plots are taken to task-- but that isn't really a complaint, as Orwell admits. It is intriguing that Orwell notes how ideology leaves Dickens frozen as if in amber, a curiosity from a simplistic world view. He notes the modernity of Joyce in comparison but leaves engagement unrealized, stillborn. As with the best of Orwell's other essays this marks a triumph of the expository and it is thus recommended. ( )