He's mainly focused on appraising on the material content of Dickens' work, the ways in which he evinces a distinct social and political perspective, reflective of his class and upbringing. For all he is read as a social reformer, there is much in him that can be interpreted as right-wing. But despite the essay having pages and pages of criticism and focus on Dickens' weaknesses and limitations, the things he was unable to imagine or write, I never lose the sense that this is criticism borne of fondness and high esteem. I admire Orwell for being a very commonsensical thinker, in the sense that he followed simple, orderly logic that, I think, lead him to smarter, more perceptive insights than many cleverer people. He is always careful to note when what he is describing is multifaceted and self-contradictory, which prevents him from appearing to produce a hatchet job.
At various points, he makes appropriate comparisons with William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope, comparisons which did make me more interested in trying those authors.
Here the contrast between Dickens and, say, Trollope is startling. And one reason for this is undoubtedly that Dickens knows very little about the professions his characters are supposed to follow. What exactly went on in Gradgrind's factories? How did Podsnap make his money? How did Merdle work his swindles? One knows that Dickens could never follow up the details of Parliamentary elections and Stock Exchange rackets as Trollope could. As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance, industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire. This is the case even with legal processes, about which actually he must have known a good deal. Compare any lawsuit in Dickens with the lawsuit in Orley Farm, for instance.
And later:
As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. Little Dorrit, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late twenties; Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's ‘invention’ in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, ‘of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures’, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the ‘invention’ is!
This in particular renewed my desire to read La Bête Humaine by Zola, because I've heard it to contain a passionate interest in the workings of the railways as Zola had for all the economic sectors of French life he wrote about.
Finally, it's in this piece where he makes one famous declaration:
I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his ‘message’, and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message’, whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.
But reading this and his essay on the worldview of Jonathan Swift, it's all too clear that he is hostile to the idea that art with politics agreeable to him is superior to art opposed. My interpretation is that, that is art is propaganda is to emphasize the value of honesty and observational truth in art, not to deride it.
It is often argued, at least by people who admit the importance of subject-matter, that a book cannot be "good" if it expresses a palpably false view of life. We are told that in our own age, for instance, any book that has genuine literary merit will also be more or less "progressive" in tendency. This ignores the fact that throughout history a similar struggle between progress and reaction has been raging, and that the best books of any one age have always been written from several different viewpoints, some of them palpably more false than others. In so far as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is that he shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly. To-day, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction.
by PM_BRAIN_WORMS