Scholars have discussed the topic of racism in the works of 19th-century English author Charles Dickens, with increased focus in the 20th and 21st centuries. While Dickens was known to be highly sympathetic to the plight of the poor and disadvantaged in British society, like many other authors of the period he expressed attitudes in his journalism and works which have been interpreted as racist and xenophobic. Dickens frequently defended the privileges held by Europeans in overseas colonies and was dismissive of what he termed "primitive" cultures. The Oxford Dictionary of English Literature describes Dickens as a nationalist who frequently stigmatised non-European cultures.
Some scholars have disputed the charge that Dickens was racist. Dickens scholar Priti Joshi, for example, maintains that he never advocated any form of scientific racism in his works, but held extreme antipathy for non-European peoples, and steadfastly believed in their assimilation into Western culture. Other scholars, such as Grace Moore, claim that Dickens' racism abated in his later years, while historian Patrick Brantlinger and journalist William Oddie have instead claimed that his racism intensified during that period. Moore contends that while in his later years Dickens became more aware of the mistreatment of non-European peoples under the system of colonialism, he never lost his antipathy for their culture, consistently maintaining that it was inferior to Western culture.
Controversies over Dickens' racism
Many scholars have commented on the contrast between his support for liberal causes at home and lack of such support for liberal causes abroad. In a private letter to Emily de la Rue, Dickens wrote the following passage on Indians: "You know faces, when they are not brown; you know common experiences when they are not under turbans; Look at the dogs low, treacherous, murderous, tigerous villains." Dickens also called for the "extermination" of the Indian people and applauded the "mutilation" of the "wretched Hindoo" who were punished by being blown from the guns for the involvement in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. In his 1990 biography, Peter Ackroyd noted Dickens' sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labour, involvement in campaigns for sanitation reform, and opposition to capital punishment. He also asserted that "In modern terminology Dickens was a "racist" of the most egregious kind, a fact that ought to give pause to those who persist in believing that he was necessarily the epitome of all that was decent and benign in the previous century."
According to Ackroyd, Dickens did not believe that the Union in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the Confederacy for that reason. Ackroyd twice noted that Dickens' major objection to missionaries was that they were more concerned with the welfare of non-Europeans abroad than with the poor at home in Europe. For example, in Bleak House Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children to care for the inhabitants of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his stereotypical depiction of other races has also been a topic considered by Patrick Brantlinger in his 2002 A Companion to the Victorian Novel. He cites Dickens' description of an Irish-American settlement in America's Catskill mountains as a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. According to Brantlinger, Dickens viewed them as a "racially repellent" group. Jane Smiley, in her Penguin Lives biography of Dickens, writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal we know today he was racist, imperialist, sometimes antisemitic, a believer in harsh prison conditions, and distrustful of trade unions". An opening note to Charles Dickens' Australia, a selection of Dickens' essays from Household Words, noted to the reader that in these essays "Women, the Irish, Chinese and Aborigines are described in biased, racist, stereotypical or otherwise less than flattering terms." The Historical Encyclopedia of Anti-Semitism notes the paradox of Dickens both being a "champion of causes of the oppressed" who abhorred slavery and supported the European liberal revolutions of the 1840s, and his creation of the antisemitic caricature of the character of Fagin.