Cultural Chauvinism In Bleak House

As a prolific Victorian writer of novels, plays, novellas, and non-fictional prose including letters, Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) became known all over the world for his remarkable characters, his mastery of prose, and his depictions of the social classes, customs and values of his times. Some believed that he was a staunch defender of the working classes and has often been celebrated as a champion of the oppressed and the downtrodden. But it has sometimes been noted that both in his journalism and fiction he expresses attitudes that can be interpreted as racist and xenophobic. He opposed slavery but defended colonialists against their native attackers and opposed suffrage for blacks on grounds of cultural superiority. 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”

They point out one such reference in the novel Bleak House, in which Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. In Dickens in Context, Ledger and Furneaux argue that Dickens was a nativist and “cultural chauvinist” in the sense of being highly ethnocentric and in his justification of British imperialism. But at the same time they also argue that Dickens is not a racist in the sense of being a “biological determinist” as, in their opinion, 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.” (Ledger