In light of the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department, the even more recent shooting of Jacob Blake, and the other unconscionable acts of violence inflicted lately and too routinely upon members of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities in the United States and around the world, the Dickens Society affirms that it stands in solidarity with BIPOC individuals and organizations. We stand with the courageous protestors demanding racial justice, and we repudiate the institutions and individuals who would deny them the justice to which they are entitled. We reject the police state, white nationalism, white supremacy, and bigotry of all kinds. We affirm that Black Lives Matter.

We study the life and works of Charles Dickens not only because he was a great artist but because, among other reasons, doing so promotes a more complete understanding of racial, economic, and other forms of injustice during the nineteenth century and in our own time. Much discomfort inheres in studying an author who expressed contradictory, sometimes unsatisfactory opinions about people of color during his life. However, studying Dickens’s works can illuminate the attitudes about white superiority that undergirded racial oppression and imperial expansion during the Victorian period, and the ways in which such thoughts and attitudes, when rendered artistically by an enormously popular writer, can create durable perceptions of racial difference. Dickens’s extraordinary popularity in the United Kingdom, in the United States, and throughout the British Empire during the last two thirds of the nineteenth century created monumental social and cultural impacts. Yet the period of extraordinary economic expansion that permitted him to have a lucrative career as an editor and popular novelist was built upon the contemporary and historical legacy of slave labor and racial exploitation at home and abroad. In India, Jamaica, Australia, and across Africa, among other places, the national prosperity that sustained Dickens’s career depended upon systematic racial oppression, religious intolerance, resource extraction, and other forms of bigotry and exploitation that in some cases originated and have certainly sustained the very injustices that BIPOC individuals continue to struggle against today.

We recognize that the Dickens Society, and Dickens studies generally, have not acknowledged often or forcefully enough the troubling ways in which Dickens’s works address race, even though a growing number of important critical voices have begun addressing his engagement with fugitive slave narratives, wider forms of economic exploitation grounded in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and fraught structures of imperial expansion. We support and encourage this work. We recognize, but we have not explored fully, the manifold ways in which Dickens’s life and career must be considered in light of their implicit dependence upon the structures of racism that make movements such as Black Lives Matter necessary in the twenty-first century. We commit, therefore, to the crucial task of foregrounding BIPOC voices in and beyond the Dickens Society, encouraging anti-racism among our members and in the study of Dickens generally, and addressing thoughtfully and rigorously the considerations of race that shape both the artistry and materiality of Charles Dickens’s works.