If, in your sympathy for Mrs. Quilp, you call Dickens the
champion of downtrodden woman, you will suddenly remember Mr. Wilfer,
and find yourself unable to deny the existence of downtrodden man. If in
your sympathy for Mr. Rouncewell you call Dickens the champion of a
manly middle-class Liberalism against Chesney Wold, you will suddenly
remember Stephen Blackpool--and find yourself unable to deny that Mr.
Rouncewell might be a pretty insupportable cock on his own dung-hill. If
in your sympathy for Stephen Blackpool you call Dickens a Socialist (as
does Mr. Pugh), and think of him as merely heralding the great
Collectivist revolt against Victorian Individualism and Capitalism,
which seemed so clearly to be the crisis at the end of this epoch--you
will suddenly remember the agreeable young Barnacle at the
Circumlocution Office: and you will be unable, for very shame, to
assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department.
Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak
modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood
in sin as well as in aspiration.
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