Charles Dickens — "The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid."
The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.
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More from Charles Dickens
"I have no patience with people who are always talking about their own grievances."
"The American women are certainly not pretty... They are not graceful, they are not elegant, they are not accomplished, they are not intellectual, they are not virtuous, and they are not honest."
"I have no doubt that the mass of the working people of England are as yet, in their own country, an unknown territory to the educated classes."
"Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door."
"I am not a man of many words, but I am a man of many thoughts."
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.