When I say that Dickens is radical propaganda, I do not mean merely that he wrote novel after novel exposing the abuses of his time, the cruelties of the poor laws, the horrors of the debtors’ prisons, the delays and corruptions of the courts, the knaveries and imbecilities of politics. I do not mean merely that he hated by instinct and ridiculed all through his life, lawyers and judges and newspaper editors and preachers and priests of capitalist prosperity. I mean something more deep and more fundamental than that: I mean that the very selection of his themes and of his characters, the whole environment and atmosphere of his novels, is a piece of propaganda. For Dickens proceeds to force into the aristocratic and exclusive realms of art the revolutionary notion that the poor and degraded are equally as interesting as the rich and respectable. We are invited, not merely to laugh at the antics of illiterate and unrefined people, as in Shakespeare; we are invited to enter into their hearts and minds, to put ourselves in their place and actually live their experiences. As reward for so doing, we are offered treasures of laughter and tears and thrills. I don’t know how it is nowadays, but in my boyhood, which was some twenty years after Dickens’ death, everybody read him--my rich relatives, who read nothing else, and my poor relatives, broken-down Southern aristocrats, who read nothing else except the life of Robert E. Lee. And then in New York, the people I met in boarding-houses and third-rate lodgings--all shuddered over Bill Sykes and wept over Paul Dombey and laughed over Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. Dickens was, and remained to the end, from the point of view of leisure-class culture, a quite vulgar person. He took a naive delight in his worldly triumphs, and counted the success of his books by sales and money. He was a born actor, and loved to shine before the public; devising dramatic readings of his works, and taking endless tours, both in England and America, gathering great sums of money--though of course not to be compared with the moving picture fortunes of our day. It was a time when audiences liked to shed tears out loud, and Dickens liked to join them; he has all the tremolo stops in his organ, and piles on sentiment until we shudder. Fastidious and literary persons have now made it fashionable to declare that Dickens is unreadable; but the people have read him, and his sentiment as well as his humor are a part of our racial heritage, and one of the fountain-heads of the Socialist movement. His books are a five million word reiteration of the old Chartist hymn-- When wilt thou save the people? O God of mercy! when? Not kings and lords, but nations! Not thrones and crowns, but men!