ABSTRACT
Scholars alternately admire Charles Dickens for casting light on the problems of the Victorian capitalist system in England and denigrate him for supporting the racist, ethnocentric policies of colonialism. His critics often claim that Dickens presents a unified vision about imperialism throughout his career. David Suchoff asserts that “Dickens supported Empire. . . and the subjection
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of colonial peoples, in accord with popular norms” (43). In his celebrated critique of colonial texts, Rule of Darkness, Patrick Brantlinger also cites Dickens as an ardent imperialist, documenting Dickens’s letters which address the Jamaica Rebellion of 1865 and referring to his “Noble Savage” essay. He claims: ‘ ‘Dickens’ sympathy for the downtrodden poor at home is reversed abroad, translated into approval of imperial domination” (207). Dickens’s 1865 letter to Ceijat seems to support their position: “That platform-sympathy with the blacks-or the native, or the devil-in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark wild” (11:115). He appears to blame the natives rather than imperial presence or policies for any unrest in the colonies. Edward Said also claims, “even Dickens had definite views on race and imperialism, which are quite easy to be found” (12). But their criticism presents a congruent, unproblematized vision of Dickens’s work as pro-em pire and racist. Moreover, the criticism of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (hereafter referred to as Edwin Drood) often ignores the unfinished novel’s treatment of imperialism and focuses on solving the mystery of Edwin’s murder.1 While some scholars note the tensions of empire in the incomplete novel, they read it as a continuation of Dickens’s inexorable attitudes about the need for strict controls in the colonies. Ina Rae Hark notes that in The Mystery of Edwin Drood the East is a “malignant. . . force” which functions to infect or destroy Cloisterham (166). In Reaches of Empire, Suvendrini Perera also observes that Dickens was “interested in empire’s impact on the domestic life of the metropolis” (108). Both Hark and Perera recognize the colonial connections in Edwin Drood, but they believe Dickens viewed these effects as unidirectional, unwholesome Eastern influences visited upon Great Britain. Their criticism asserts that Dickens indicts colonial influence as an infection of England by the lazy, unclean natives and the commodities they produce.2
