Dickens in the 21st Century

Today, what to do about Syria dominates the headlines: the news is that Russia and the U S have brokered a deal with Syria about what to do about its chemical weapons. We ask, almost paradoxically, Would bombing Syria help bring peace to the region? Caught up in questions like these, we are also well aware of the deep social and racial conflicts still alive in Britain and America. We find ourselves in contemporary America in a society where conflicts over racism are still central and even the name George Zimmerman, like the name Scrooge, awakens images in most minds. Although many of the social problems Dickens attacked and remedied—child labor, pestilential drinking water, and filthy living conditions for the poor (ours may live in regions hit by hurricanes rather than in urban London)—we find many social and cultural problems still exist to torment us in our current oft-conflicted age. Deep fissures still exist in American and British society, and we need to hear the opinions of an optimistic social reformer. We need his far-seeing eyes and zeal for reform. And he understood the peccadilloes of human nature, our psychological motivations, and how to survive in challenging times. After all, he wrote the novel Hard Times.