Charles Dickens — "I am not a believer in the perfectibility of human nature."
I am not a believer in the perfectibility of human nature.
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More from Charles Dickens
"I think that the best thing a man can do is to try to make the best of everything."
"It is a most remarkable thing that the most important events of our lives are often brought about by the most trivial causes."
"There is a great deal of humbug in the world, and a good deal of it in England."
"I think that the English people are, on the whole, a very dull people."
"I have a great contempt for all cant and humbug."
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.