bio of Charles dickens and hitlor
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Charles Dickens is known as a writer who was strongly sympathetic to the disadvantaged in Britain, in common with many eminent writers of his time he expressed attitudes that can be interpreted as racist and xenophobic in his journalism and fiction. 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 colonial Europeans and was dismissive of what he believed were primitive cultures. The Oxford Dictionary of English Literature describes Dickens as nationalistic, often stigmatising foreign European cultures and taking his attitude to "colonized people" to "genocidal extremes",[1] albeit based mainly on a vision of British virtue, rather than any concept of heredity. Ledger and Ferneaux do not believe he advocated any form of "scientific racism" regarding heredity – 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.[2]
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.[3] Moore contends that while Dickens later in life became far more sensitive to unethical aspects 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".