Fellow Travelers: Wilson, Orwell, Trilling, Dickens

In the 1940s and early 1950s, three establishment critics, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and George Orwell, each independently wrote essays championing the relevance of Dickens for their own time, an age of intense political conflict. Why? What seems most likely is that they were drawn to Dickens out of a feeling of political partisanship, of kindred-spiritedness. As much as some may strive for objective standards by which to judge literature, artistic tastes and inclinations are shaped, bent, and sometimes broken by current affairs and the times people live in. This article is a personal meditation on the value of reading a classic writer such as Dickens during times of social and political instability.