‘Foreign Languages and Original Understanding in Little Dorrit', in Anny Sadrin (ed.), Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 155–68

Household Words 7 (11 June 1853, repr. in The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces, in tro . Leslie C. S taples [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958] 467-73), Dickens stresses that he has 'not the least belief in the Noble Savage' and attacks him as a humbug (to praise him is as hypocritical as Mrs M erdle 's w ish for a m ore primitive state of society); Dickens also makes clear that so-called civilisation is by no m eans free from ignoble savagery. Cf. his ironical remark that 'we have assuredly nothing of the Zulu Kaffer left' (472).