George Stephen, 1st Baron Mount Stephen bare-footed stable boy, he became the richest man in Canada and closely associated with George V, whose wife, Queen Mary, was a lifelong friend and confidante of the second Lady Mount Stephen. In 1829, Stephen was born at Dufftown, Banffshire, in a cottage built by his grandfather. He was the son of William Stephen (b. 1801), a carpenter, and Elspet, daughter of John Smith, a crofter at Knockando, Moray. His mother was a first cousin of the philanthropic Grant brothers of Manchester, immortalised as the "Cheeryble Brothers" in Charles Dickens' book, Nicholas Nickleby. Stephen began life as a boy running
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens foreign European cultures and taking his attitude to "colonized people" to "genocidal extremes", 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. 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. Moore contends