Charles Dickens museum condemns his ‘prejudice’
Charles Dickens museum condemns his ‘prejudice’
Craig SimpsonSat, May 23, 2026 at 8:00 AM UTC
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Charles Dickens was a supporter of the British Empire, but ‘not for its diversity’, a document issued to staff at a museum states - Archive Photos
A Charles Dickens museum has condemned his “prejudice” and support for the British Empire.
The council-run Guildhall Museum in Rochester, which has displays dedicated to the writer, has produced guidance on his “particularly upsetting” views.
This internal document informs staff that Dickens had opinions that can “cause great offence today”.
They are also informed that he was a supporter of the British Empire, but “not for its diversity”.
Instead, the author of Great Expectations believed the Empire “was the best way to make the world more like white, middle-class England”.
The guidance was created to make Dickens’ views clear to staff at the Guildhall in Rochester, a Kent town close to the author’s heart, having lived in neighbouring Chatham as a child, and in nearby Higham as an established writer.
New displays about the writer were opened by the Queen, then the Duchess of Cornwall, in 2022.
The Queen, then the Duchess of Cornwall, opened a new exhibition at the Guildhall Museum in 2022 - Arthur Edwards/The Sun/PA
Internal guidance states that the museum, which otherwise celebrates the work of the local Victorian novelist, disowns the darker part of the Dickensian oeuvre, including his lack of universalism.
This is seen in his mockery of 19th-century missionaries and others who “travelled abroad for charitable and evangelical purposes”, believing instead that “such efforts should be directed to communities within Britain”. This was because of his “idea of racial superiority founded upon his understanding of the importance of the British Empire”.
The guidance continues: “Today we reject his views, but even at the time, there were a number of important figures who argued for the universal worth of all people and cultures, regardless of race or background. We have to acknowledge that Dickens did not think like this.”
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Not only did Dickens not think like this, the guidance states, the author “makes a link between race and moral worth” in a number of places. These include his doubts that the white crew of the doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition resorted to cannibalism, instead blaming the Inuit.
It is also said that he mocked foreign customs in print, and called for retribution following the 1857 Indian Mutiny, using, in his private letters, “language relating to the perpetrators of the violence in India that was essentially genocidal”.
After the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion of black workers in Jamaica, which was bloodily suppressed by Governor Edward John Eyre, Dickens joined a number of fellow intellectuals in defending the governor, who others wanted to see tried.
Guidance for staff at the museum, overseen by Medway council, noted that Dickens’ views were surprising as he was in favour of abolition and wrote about the American South’s slave economy and the “horrors of the system”.
The Guildhall Museum in Rochester
It concludes: “Dickens’ views on race can have no place in our society. There were, moreover, in his time, liberal Victorians whose attitude towards cultural diversity would have resembled our own.
“Dickens, though in many ways a fair-minded man, took advantage of certain situations to promote a vociferous intolerance which he expressed in grossly offensive terms.
“We can only acknowledge those views and publicly reject them, while celebrating those aspects of his work that continue to bring pleasure to people of diverse races and cultures in our world today.”
The reappraisal of Dickens came following years of unease in academic and cultural circles about the views of Britain’s great writers, renewed by Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
The British Library responded to a protest by creating a dossier of writers with links to the slave trade, however tenuous, and controversially included Ted Hughes, the poet. The wife of the late writer complained and received an apology from the library.
In 2025, The Telegraph revealed that William Shakespeare’s birthplace was to be “decolonised” following concerns about the playwright being used to promote “white supremacy”.
Source: “AOL Breaking”
