askchapo

I like Dickens quite a lot. However he is a Brit and was a lib. Dickens' personal history is very tragic and his trauma over child labor encouraged much of his work. A Christmas Carol was written to bring the findings of an investigation into labor in England to the British middle class and essentially shame them. He originally wanted it to be more of a polemic called "'An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child", but realized that a story could do more. Writing

rest assured that when you know [it], and see what I do, and where and how, you will certainly feel that a sledge-hammer has come down with twenty times the force — twenty thousand times the force I could exert by following out my first idea. Even so recently as when I wrote to you the other day I had not contemplated the means I shall now, please God, use. But they have been suggested to me; and I have girded myself for their seizure— as you shall see in due time.

However as progressive as he was, Dickens was still very anti-revolution. He did not really view injustices like slavery, wage or chattel, as part of a larger evil, but rather as social moral failings. Dickens said he read Carlyle's history of the Revolution 500 times as his basis for Tale of Two Cities. A book by a Brit and very anti-Jacobin though also utterly anti ancien regime which Dickens was as well. French historians took their time to really approach the era again and when they did history had become a much more professional field, so even the more critical ones are much better as histories than Carlyle's. Not that Carlyle was unbearably bad, Marx and Engels favored him to the rest of British writers

Marx identified the literary as well as the political representatives of the English bourgeoisie as Pecksniffs in an assessment of the work of Thomas Carlyle written with Engels in 1850. Carlyle’s style, they argue, ‘is at one with his ideas. It is a direct violent reaction against the modern English Pecksniffery [‘Pecksniff-stil’] …whose circumspect verbosity and vague, sentimentally moral tediousness has spread…to the whole of English literature’. Carlyle, and by implication Dickens, are exceptions to, and critics of, the bourgeois discursive norm.

It is just that he viewed history as epic poetry, not science. Plus he disliked democracy so there's that.

For Dickens the revolution was inevitable cause the aristocracy wouldn't ease up and be compassionate, and he was warning the English that they would suffer the same fate. So there is a class analysis there, it is just not a dialectical one, it ignores the processes of history and the conflict between absolute monarchism and emergent capitalism as well as the historically progressive nature of the Jacobins. Dickens did become soured on reformism after '48, but he was never really pro-revolution.

Interesting paper on all this, though more focused on Marx and Engels' adoption of metaphors and rhetoric. https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/65/1/1/640507

also one I only read part of on British literature and the revolution https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/file_store/production/56179/7CC434AE-5845-4850-8A4B-C52268FB6D90.pdf