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Although Charles Dickens is best known as a writer of coming-of-age novels about children and adolescents and as a champion of the downtrodden poor,〔For example published author Sue Wilkes describes him on her personal blog as "Champion of the poor" () Dickens critique of the "stone-cold" heart of the upper classes is discussed in this review of the 2012 television presentation of ''Great Expectations'' ()〕 it has sometimes been noted that both in his journalism and fiction he expresses attitudes that can be interpreted as racist and xenophobic, as was true of many eminent writers of his time. While it cannot be said that he opposed fundamental freedoms of minorities in British society or supported legal segregation or employment discrimination, he defended the privileges of Europeans in colonies and was highly xenophobic of primitive cultures. He opposed slavery but defended colonialists against their native attackers. Questions have been raised as to whether Dickens believed in biological determinism or was instead a cultural chauvinist. Ledger and Ferneaux do not believe he advocated any form of "scientific racism" regarding heredity- he had no concept at all of a superior "master race" and could not be described as either a white supremacist or segregationist – but still had the highest possible antipathy for the lifestyles of native peoples in British colonies, and believed that the sooner they were civilised, the better.〔Ledger, Sally; Holly Ferneaux (2011). ''Dickens in Context.'' Cambridge University Press. pp. 297–299. ISBN 0-521-88700-3, 9780521887007.〕 The ''Oxford Dictionary of English Literature'' describes Dickens as nationalistic often both stigmatising foreign European cultures and taking his attitude to "colonized people" to "genocidal extremes",〔Kastan, David Scott (2006). Oxford Encyclopedia of English Literature, vol 1. Oxford University Press. p. 157. ISBN 0-19-516921-2, 9780195169218〕 albeit based mainly on a vision of British virtue, but not on any concept of heredity. One of the best known instances of this is Dickens' portrait of Fagin in one of his most widely read early novels ''Oliver Twist'', which has been seen by some as deeply antisemitic, though others such as Dickens' biograper G.K. Chesterton have argued against this notion. The novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as "the Jew", while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned. Dickens' attacked John Rae's report on the fate of the Franklin expedition, based on Inuit testimonies, calling the Inuit evidence unreliable, and attacking their character as covetous and cruel. He co-authored the play ''The Frozen Deep'', as an allegorical attack on Rae. In response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Dickens advocated genocide against the Indian race writing the allegorical ''The Perils of Certain English Prisoners''. In ''Perils'' Dickens describes the "native Sambo", a paradigm of the Indian mutineers,〔 as a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre. Dickens was much incensed by the massacre in which over a hundred English prisoners, most of them women and children, were killed, and on 4 October 1857 wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India. ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested ...". In his essay ''The Noble Savage'', Dickens' attitude towards Native Americans is one of condescending pity, tempered (in the interpretation of Grace Moore)〔Grace Moore, "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'", The Dickensian 98:458 (2002): 236–243〕 by a counterbalancing concern with the arrogance of European colonialism. This essay was Dickens' rejection of painter George Catlin's positive portrayal of Native Americans. The term "Noble Savage" was in circulation since the 17th century, but Dickens regards it as an absurd oxymoron. He advocated that savages be civilised "off the face of the earth". Dickens is sometimes thought of as a champion of the oppressed, but his humanitarian impulse often seems to extend to only other Europeans. Dickens scholar Grace Moore sees Dickens' racism as having abated in his later years, while cultural historian Patrick Brantlinger and journalist William Oddie see it as having intensified.〔Grace Moore, ''Dickens and Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens'' (Nineteenth Century Series) (Ashgate: 2004).〕 Moore contends that while Dickens later in life became far more sensitive to the unethical character of British colonialism and came to plead mitigation of cruelties to natives, he never lost his distaste for those whose life style he regarded as primitive". The role of Fagin in ''Oliver Twist'' continues to be a challenge for actors who struggle with questions as to how to interpret the role in a post-Nazi era. Various Jewish writers, directors, and actors have searched for ways to "salvage" Fagin. Late in life, Dickens developed close friendships with Jews and unambiguously retracted his earlier antisemitic views and created a sympathetic Jewish character "Riah" (meaning "friend" in Hebrew) in his novel ''Our Mutual Friend'', whose goodness is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as samples of the best ...". However, Dickens' expressions of revulsion at non-European peoples and his advocacy of civilising savages remains a subject of discussion. ==Controversies over Dickens' racism== 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. The authors note that a Jewish reader wrote to Dickens about this precisely because of Dickens' overall liberal politics. Dickens' protested that he was being factual about the realities of street crime, showing criminals in their "squalid misery", yet the image of Fagin is "drawn from stage melodrama and medieval images". Fagin is also seen as one who seduces young children into a life of crime, and is seen as one who can "disorder representational boundaries". The ''Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature'' notes that while Dickens praised middle-class values, Biographer Peter Ackroyd in his 1990 biography of Dickens (the 2nd of four books on Dickens) duly notes Dickens' sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labour, campaigns for sanitation reform, opposition to capital punishment. He also asserts 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."〔 This is not the abridged edition published by Vintage as a tie-in to the BBC documentary〕 Ackroyd notes that Dickens did not believe that the North in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the South for that reason. Ackroyd twice notes that Dickens' major objection to missionaries was that they were more concerned with natives abroad than with the poor at home. Dickens did not join other liberals in condemning Jamaica's Governor Eyre's declaration of martial law after an attack on the capital's court house. In speaking on the controversy, Dickens' attacked "that platform sympathy with the black- or the native or the Devil.."〔 For authors Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, it is a puzzle as to how one can square away Dickens' racialism for concern with the poor and the downcast. One example of their juxtaposition they cite is ''Bleak House'' in which Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. In their book ''Dickens in Context'' they argue that Dickens was a nativist and "cultural chauvinist" in the sense of being highly ethnocentric and ready to justify British imperialism, but not a racist in the sense of being a "biological determinist" as was the anthropologist Robert Knox. That is Dickens did not regard the behaviour of races to be "fixed"; rather his appeal to "civilization" suggests not biological fixity but the possibility of alteration. However, "Dickens views of racial others, most fully developed in his short fiction, indicate that for him 'savages' functioned as a handy foil against which British national identity could emerge." The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his crude caricatures of other races has also been noted by Patrick Brantlinger in his ''A companion to the Victorian novel''. He cites Dickens' description of an Irish colony in America's Catskill mountains a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. Dickens views them as a "racially repellent" group. Jane Smiley writing in the Penguin Lives bio 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 anthology of Dickens' essays from ''Household Words'' warns the reader in its introduction that in these essays "Women, the Irish, Chinese and Aborigines are described in biased, racist, stereotypical or otherwise less than flattering terms....We..encourage you to work towards a more positive understanding of the different groups that make up our community" William Oddie argues that Dickens's racism "grew progressively more illiberal over the course of his career" particularly after the Indian rebellion.〔''Dickens and Carlyle: the Question of Influence'' (London: Centenary) pp. 135–42, and “Dickens and the Indian Mutiny”, ''Dickensian'' 68 (January 1972), 3–15;〕 Grace Moore, on the other hand, argues that Dickens, a staunch abolitionist and opponent of imperialism, had views on racial matters that were a good deal more complex than previous critics have suggested in her work ''Dickens And Empire:'' 〔''Dickens and Empire: Discourses Of Class, Race And Colonialism In The Works Of Charles Dickens (Nineteenth Century Series)'' (Ashgate: 2004).〕 She suggests that overemphasising Dickens' racism obscures his continued commitment to the abolition of slavery.〔"Reappraising Dickens' Noble Savage" ''Dickensian'' 98.3 2002 p. 236-44〕 Laurence Mazzeno has characterised Moore's approach as depicting Dickens' attitude to race as highly complex, "struggling to differentiate between ideas of race and class in his fiction...sometimes in step with his age, sometimes its fiercest critic." Others have observed that Dickens also denied suffrage to blacks, writing in a letter "Free of course he must be; but the stupendous absurdity of making him a voter glares out of every roll of his eye". Bernard Porter suggests that Dickens' race prejudice caused him to actually oppose imperialism rather than promote it citing the character of Mrs. Jellyby in ''Bleak House'' and the essay ''The Noble Savage'' as evidence. In an essay on George Eliot, K.M. Newton notes 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Racism in the work of Charles Dickens」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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