Charles Dickens
Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens
"The Perils of Certain English Prisoners" is an early work of fiction co-authored by Dickens and Wilkie Collins dealing allegorically with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Patrick Brantlinger regards it as melodramatic and wildly inaccurate. It appeared in the 1857 Christmas number of "Household Words". In "Perils" Dickens describes the "native Sambo", a paradigm of the Indian mutineers, as a "double-dyed traitor, and a most infernal villain" who takes part in a massacre of women and children, in an allusion to the Cawnpore Massacre. Dickens was much incensed by the massacre in which over a hundred English prisoners, most of them women and children, were killed, and on 4 October 1857 Dickens wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts: "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested ... proceeding, with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth."
Lillian Nayder has noted that Dickens collaborator, Wilkie Collins, lacked his hostility to the Indian people, nor faulted them for the mutiny to the degree that Dickens did. In Collins own work "A Sermon for the Sepoys", he preaches to the Indian mutineers from an Indian sacred text, not a Christian one. Collins disassociates himself from Dickens privately expressed desire to exterminate the Indian race, but instead appeals to their capacity for moral goodness. Moreover, Collins' famous novel "The Moonstone" suggests that it is really the Indians who were mainly on the defensive during the mutiny, not the British, contrary to the prevalent impression given by the British press.