Racism in the work of Charles Dickens For example, in his novel "Bleak House" Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his crude caricatures of other races has also been noted by Patrick Brantlinger in his "A Companion to the Victorian Novel". He cites Dickens' description of an Irish colony in America's Catskill mountains a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. Dickens views them as a "racially repellent" group. Jane Smiley writing in the Penguin Lives bio of Dickens writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal
Peter Gerald Charles Dickens Peter Gerald Charles Dickens Captain Peter Gerald Charles Dickens DSO, MBE, DSC, RN (6 April 1917 – 25 May 1987) was a Royal Navy officer during World War II and a great-grandson of novelist Charles Dickens. The son of Admiral Sir Gerald Charles Dickens and Kathlen Pearl Birch, Peter Dickens was born in Fulham in London in 1917. Dickens joined the Royal Navy as a Naval Cadet in September 1934, being promoted to Midshipman in May 1935 when he was serving aboard HMS Nelson in the Home Fleet. Dickens was Acting Sub-Lieutenant in September 1937 and Sub-Lieutenant in May 1938