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	Charles Dickens is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.
Article milestones Date Process Result March 19, 2006 Featured article candidate Not promoted March 25, 2012 Featured article candidate Not promoted
Current status: Former featured article candidate

This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

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A fact from this article was featured on Misplaced Pages's Main Page in the On this day section on February 7, 2012.

On February 7, 2012, Charles Dickens was linked from Google, a high-traffic website. (Traffic) All prior and subsequent edits to the article are noted in its revision history.

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This page has archives. Sections older than 60 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 5 sections are present.

Semi-protected edit request on 20 November 2014

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

78.32.40.42 (talk) 11:48, 20 November 2014 (UTC)gykfuyof6u76or89.d56l,e3 et789

Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format. Stickee (talk) 13:10, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 10 December 2014

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

88.15.245.56 (talk) 17:10, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Not done: as you have not requested a change.
If you want to suggest a change, please request this in the form "Please replace XXX with YYY" or "Please add ZZZ between PPP and QQQ".
Please also cite reliable sources to back up your request, without which no information should be added to, or changed in, any article. - Arjayay (talk) 17:15, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

religious views

I have a problem with this bit in religious views - 'Dickens was a professing Christian, who would be described by his son Henry Fielding Dickens as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". Though in the early 1840s Dickens had showed an interest in Unitarian Christianity, he never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism. - This is sourced to a book published by an evangelical Christian publisher , not a publisher like Yale University Press or OUP. I have just read Simon Callow's book on Charles Dickens and he states that Dickens did not believe in the divinity of Christ - he liked the parables, the teachings, the character of Jesus Christ merely. that is surely not at all 'Anglicanism' of any kind , whether described as 'popular lay Anglicanism' or whatnot. What is 'popular lay Anglicanism' anyhow. its just a term invented to get Dickens into the orthodox Christian camp as far as I can see. Its woolly really imo. I think the section is somewhat misleading in short and needs rewording and the view that he was Anglican attributed to a Christian writer, for a Christian imprint, and not set up as the final word.Sayerslle (talk) 21:19, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

"anti-americanism"

I removed that addition due to being unsourced. However after searching around a bit, it seems there is indeed some scholarly literature making the claims described in the addition. However according to a recent scholarly publication by Max Paul Friedman, such claims are questionable/disputable and somewhat outdated as well (see: M. P. Friedman: Rethinking Anti-Americanism. Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 13-15, 30-39 (excerpt at Google)).

This means if the claims are readded with proper sources, they should be contextualized with disagreeing more recent scholarly assessment's like Friedman's.--Kmhkmh (talk) 10:16, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

@CJK: If you are simply adding those claims again without proper sources I will remove them again. Such information needs to sourced even more if it is challenged. And it needs to be sourced in this article rather than possible elsewhere in Misplaced Pages. Also note that Misplaced Pages can never be a source for Misplaced Pages content. However if those two Misplaced Pages articles containing those claims do have proper sources, you may reuse/copy them in this article.--Kmhkmh (talk) 20:49, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

I didn't think that we needed a source for simply describing the contents of his works. It seems to be a matter of common knowledge. Many of the plot summaries of Dickens's novels, for example in Oliver Twist are unsourced. The article Morrill Tariff has long contained the claims of Dickens (citing his own publication), so I don't see the issue mentioning it here as well. I don't have any other sources immediately at hand.

CJK (talk) 21:12, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Well for simple plot summary of those books, I'd agree that no explicit source would be required and that you might consider it "common" knowledge" or simply consider the books themselves as sufficient sources. Describing those books as "anti-american" however falls more in the domain of analysis/interpretation/(value) assessment, for which scholarly or reputable literature review source is required, even more so if as I pointed out above such an assessment is disputed in recent scholarly publications.

There is no rush, but without a source thst conntent will have eventually to removed again or at least significantly rewritten following the scholarly source (Friedman) I referenced above. The other two Misplaced Pages articles will eventually need a source as well if the analysis/assessment there is unsourced--Kmhkmh (talk) 02:34, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

It seems that scholars have been questioning his perceived anti-Americanism for some time. .And here (all of Chapter 4) is another recent evaluation of it. In fact, as far back as 1843, C.A. Bodelson said "If Dickens's American critics had read Martin Chuzzlewit with a lower blood pressure they would have discovered that the American and English scenes are used as parallel examples of two societies that have both, though in different ways, erected acquisitiveness onto a principle" (Monod p.52). Dickens was, after all, a satirist, and no-one was spared his barbed comments. Richerman (talk) 10:58, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the additional sources, I'm really nor a Dickens anr anti-americanism expert. Friedman was just the first reputable scholarly source I came across, when quickly researching/checking the anti-americanism claims. In any case the current formulation in the article would need to be significantly revised or deleted. In addition the two articles on the Dickens novels from which those claims were apparently taken may need a revision as well.--Kmhkmh (talk) 12:21, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

I didn't explicitly say it was anti-American, I wrote "he repeatedly attacks Americans" in Martin Chuzzlewit which I believe is an uncontroversial fact. He actually went out of his way to write the republic was so maimed and lame, so full of sores and ulcers, foul to the eye and almost hopeless to the sense, that her best friends turn from the loathsome creature with disgust. Later one his characters says he would draw an American Eagle like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like a ostrich, for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it— How on earth is that not anti-American?

Dickens so profoundly hated the U.S. that he leaned toward the slave-owning Confederacy, ignoring their own public admissions that they were fighting at least in part to defend slavery.

CJK (talk) 18:59, 12 February 2015 (UTC)

That wasn't what Dickens said about America, those were words spoken by his fictional characters. As American critic Albert J. Guerard said later, he took a "pure creative joy in grotesque invention". His characters weren't saying what he thought, they were over the top caricatures using hyperbole for comic effect. Yes, he was annoyed and disappointed with the Americans after his first visit but if, as you say, he profoundly hated the US he would hardly have gone on a second tour some years later. Richerman (talk) 00:42, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

The first quote was not from a character and the second quote came in the context of summing up the experience in America. Every single American character is portrayed in a negative light. That it was anti-American was universally acknowledged at the time. Obviously when relations between the two countries grew closer in the 20th century there was a strong interest to sweep this under the rug. Dickens could hardly ignore the fact that at most English speakers (hence much of his readership) lived in the U.S., which is why he visited it again. He did, however, either during or shortly after the visit take cheap shots at the policy of enfranchising blacks (see Racism in the work of Charles Dickens). The same article notes he "nearly" sided with the Confederacy. It appears that his criticism of slavery was so could take cheap shots at white Americans, not because he genuinely sympathized with blacks.

CJK (talk) 15:35, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, yes, you're right, I misread that, he said it as the narrator. However, according to this article his view of America changed after his second tour. As for his views on slavery, the article about his racism also quotes Moore as saying "overemphasising Dickens' racism obscures his continued commitment to the abolition of slavery". It's not surprising that he didn't think that blacks should have the vote - women in Britain didn't get the vote until 1918 and then they had to be property owners. However, there's nothing to sweep under the carpet - he was a man of his time and, although enlightened in many ways he was flawed in others. But this all just shows why we have to be careful about not letting our own opinions creep in when we're editing and only add information that can be supported with reliable sources. Richerman (talk) 16:44, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

In any case one cannot really assess his (real or perceived) anti-americanism based only on a few individual quotes (bing possibly out of contet as well), but one need to look at the overall person. More importantly however any such assessment needs to be done by reputabke eternal sources rather than by Misplaced Pages editors themselves. We avoid analysing/assessing such things by ourselves, but instead report/summarize the assessments of reputable eternal sources. That is "the" cornerstone of writing Misplaced Pages articles and exactly the reason why edit in its current form is problematic. Its is an (from a certain perspective reasonable/justified) assessment by a Misplaced Pages editor rather than report of the assessments of reputable external sources and what is worse, it is even contradicting various recent scholarly sources. From the Misplaced Pages perspective that's a clear no-go.--Kmhkmh (talk) 21:09, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

The only thing I wrote was that he attacked Americans in Martin Chuzzlewit and published an article blaming the Civil War on high tariffs. That really isn't too controversial.

CJK (talk) 17:06, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

• We should use summary style here. I've rewritten that section according to a Dickens scholar using a chapter from The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. It's best to keep plot summaries and lit. crit. on the individual subpages. Victoria (tk) 17:50, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Citation markup

I noticed that the citation markup in this article is such that a cite to a single source such as, <ref>{{harvnb|Black|2007|p=735}}.</ref> includes the ref brackets. Theses are not necessary, as {{sfn|Black|2007|p=735}} accomplishes the same thing, and it's arguably better because there is no need to name each citation in order to indicate multiple cites to the same reference. I think it would be better to remove the unnecessary reference brackets, but I don't want to do that only to be reverted, as it's a lot of busywork, so I'm seeking guidance here. Rationalobserver (talk) 17:26, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

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