The Guildhall Museum in Rochester exists, in part, to present the work of one of the greatest writers in the English language, Charles Dickens, to the public. It will come as no surprise to discover that in 2026, this consists of denouncing him. Dickens had an “idea of racial superiority”, according to internal guidance produced by the museum. “Today we reject his views… Dickens’s views on race can have no place in our society,” it adds, pointing to “a vociferous intolerance which he expressed in grossly offensive terms”.

On the evidence of his novels, Dickens had very little interest in racial superiority and the British Empire. In Bleak House, Mrs Jellyby is so taken up with an African colony that she totally neglects her own children. When Arthur Clennam goes to China in Little Dorrit, Pip goes to Egypt or Magwitch to Australia in Great Expectations, the novel doesn’t follow them — Dickens just wasn’t interested. Even the potentially thrilling strand of Walter Gay’s journey to the West Indies and shipwreck in Dombey and Son isn’t narrated. To some, this neglect may be enough to earn modern scorn, but it’s hardly an endorsement of Britain’s Empire or racial views of the time. Dickens is also alleged to have made a few robust private comments about the Indian Mutiny and other frightful crimes. Our modern views, so the cancel culture story goes, don’t agree with him; therefore, he is no good.

Astonishingly, it is true that Victorian writers don’t have the same views as we do. The museum suggests that, instead of Dickens, we read “liberal Victorians whose attitude towards cultural diversity would have resembled our own”. These might be a bit thin on the ground. George Eliot is questionable — “they are as rich as Jews, those Waules,” goes the infamous line from Middlemarch. William Thackeray has a black character called Sambo in Vanity Fair, and the hero of The Newcomes has made a fortune in India. And as for Anthony Trollope, it really may be best not to go there at all. Some of those “liberal Victorians” — Harriet Martineau, who argued for cultural relativism, or the ferociously moralistic Charles Kingsley — have a nasty knack of yielding some no doubt deplorable observation here and there.

The fact is that if your standard of aesthetic judgement is whether you happen to agree with a novelist or not, the merits of a novel will hurtle, implausibly, from greatness to its opposite, eating up and spitting out a succession of masterpieces as you go. A few decades ago, Huckleberry Finn was considered by some to be the greatest of all American novels. Now you’d sooner find a critic advocating the genocide of the people of Idaho than admitting to admiring it.

It appears impossible to the junior curators of a provincial museum that anyone might enjoy and even admire a novel without considering whether they would agree with its author on all subjects. Indian readers were apparently untroubled by Dickens’s views on their society. In the very extensive network of English-language subscription libraries in India in the late 19th century, Dickens remained the third most popular author after Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton for decades.

The only thing worth saying about the unresisting imbecility of the curators of Rochester is that they are trying to dismiss the savage creator of Wackford Squeers, Old Turveydrop, Mrs Gamp, Uriah Heep and hundreds of others. What a page Dickens would have written about the sanctimonious individuals who take a monthly salary and comfortably denounce one of the greatest novelists who ever lived. Dickens hated hypocrisy and dishonesty more than anything. Here, he would have riches to feast on.

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Philip Hensher is the author of 11 novels and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. His new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, will be published by Pelican in September.

PhilipHensher

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