" Dickens did know what he didn't
like. He didn't like the Unrivalled Happiness which Mr. Roebuck praised;
the economic laws that were working so faultlessly in Fever Alley; the
wealth that was accumulating so rapidly in Bleeding Heart Yard. But,
above all, he didn't like the _mean_ side of the Manchester philosophy:
the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance. He
hated the implication that because a man was a miser in Latin he must
also be a miser in English. And this meanness of the Utilitarians had
gone very far--infecting many finer minds who had fought the
Utilitarians. In the _Edinburgh Review_, a thing like Malthus could be
championed by a man like Macaulay.
The twin root facts of the revolution called Dickens are these: first,
that he attacked the cold Victorian compromise; second, that he
attacked it without knowing he was doing it--certainly without knowing
that other people were doing it. He was attacking something which we
will call Mr. Gradgrind. He was utterly unaware (in any essential sense)
that any one else had attacked Mr. Gradgrind. All the other attacks had
come from positions of learning or cultured eccentricity of which he was
entirely ignorant, and to which, therefore (like a spirited fellow), he
felt a furious hostility.
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