Charles Dickens — "I am a most uncompromising enemy of the present system of administering the poor…"
I am a most uncompromising enemy of the present system of administering the poor-laws.
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More from Charles Dickens
"I am convinced that nothing has effectually suffered in the world but for want of money."
"I think that the English people are, on the whole, a very dull people."
"It is a most extraordinary thing that I have never been able to get a moment's peace in my life, without having to pay for it."
"There are some people who are like a good fire—they warm you up."
"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade."
About Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
English novelist whose Oliver Twist (1838), A Christmas Carol (1843), and Bleak House (1852) made Victorian poverty inescapable for the British middle class. Closely associated with William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair rival and contemporary serial novelist) and George Eliot (later Victorian giant who built on Dickens's social-realism foundation). For an intellectual contrast, see Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism (1748-1832) — Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854) is a direct caricature of Bentham-style social calculation — 'Facts, sir, nothing but Facts!' is the most-cited literary attack on utilitarianism's reduction of human life to measurable units. Dickens's serialized social-novel form is itself a rebuke of utilitarian abstraction.