Charles Dickens

"Charles Dickens" (1940) is the longest and widely considered to be one of the greatest of the essays of George Orwell. The product of a lifelong study of Dickens, it considers his work from literary, political and sociological angles, concluding that he was a bourgeois humanitarian liberal who, though critical of 19th-century society, advocated improvement by moral rather than political means. It was profoundly influential on critical opinion of its subject.