Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (review)

"I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage," Charles Dickens famously wrote in his 1853 Household Words article on the subject: "I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth" (7 [11 June 1853] 337). "I wish I were Commander in Chief in India," Dickens told Angela Burdett Coutts four years later, referring to what Victorians generally termed the "Indian Mutiny": "I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested . . . and raze it off the face of the Earth" (Pilgrim Letters, 8: 459). What to do with such statements— how to explain, dismiss, or justify them—is a problem that plagues Dickens critics, particularly those reluctant to consider him a racist or to accept, as anything but facetious, his cavalier references to genocide. Speaking in the novelist's defense, the editors of the Pilgrim Letters (1965–2002) note that Dickens's "imaginary threats of revenge" against mutinous sepoys "were less horrific than those expressed by many British commanders in the field" (8: 459 n. 8); and Michael Slater introduces "The Noble Savage" in volume 3 of his Dent Dickens's Journalism (1999) by pointing to the extenuating circumstances under which Dickens composed it, "provoked into writing" by A. T. Caldecott's London exhibition of "Zulu Kaffirs" in 1853 (141). Rather than seeking to temper Dickens's remarks or to exonerate him from charges of racism, Patrick Brantlinger, in Rule of Darkness (1988), criticizes Dickens's "genocidal attitudes" (126), while Myron Magnet, in Dickens and the Social Order (1985), foregrounds "the other Dickens," the reactionary figure whose "program for dealing with the Indian mutiny . . . is, like Mr. Kurtz's, to exterminate all the brutes" (4).

In Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens, Grace Moore enters this debate, offering several competing explanations of Dickens's genocidal "calls," and discussing, more generally, his representations of class, race, and empire. Focusing on Dickens's treatment of American slavery, British India and the 1857 Mutiny, and the 1865 Jamaica Insurrection, Moore considers the interplay between his ideas of imperialism and race relations, on the one hand, and class relations and social reform on the other. Paying particular attention to "The Noble Savage," "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" (1857), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), as well as articles Dickens accepted for publication, she sets out to revise our understanding of his political vision. Her goals are ambitious and her claims are sometimes thought-provoking, although her arguments are often unconvincing.

Defining herself against critics such as Brantlinger, Moore is reluctant to consider Dickens racist; her reading of "The Noble Savage" suggests the spirit in which she writes her book. Moore attempts to separate Dickens's voice from the essay's narrative voice, identifying the work as a response to Lord Denman, the abolitionist and former Chief Justice who harshly criticized Dickens for his parody of Mrs. Jellyby and alleged that he harmed the abolitionist cause. Like Slater, Moore argues that Dickens was provoked into writing his essay—not by Caldecott's exhibition but by Denman's attack. She contends that Dickens sought to refute his critic by adopting the very stance Denman wrongly attributed to him, "play[ing] along with the allegations" to demonstrate their "sheer absurdity" (67).

To support this revisionary reading, Moore asserts that the tone of "The Noble Savage" is "completely at odds with anything [Dickens] had written" and "becomes much more moderate and . . . akin to Dickens's own voice" after its opening (66–67). Yet these claims are untenable. Throughout his essay, Dickens ridicules races he perceives as inferior and savage—including the Irish—and instead of breaking with his past writings, his tone recalls that of his 1848 Examiner review of...