Why does a museum want to cancel its own Charles Dickens exhibition?

The Guildhall Museum in Rochester hosts a permanent exhibition celebrating the extraordinary life and wonderful writings of Charles Dickens. Yet it has now issued an internal document intended to warn staff about the shameful life and offensive writings of Charles Dickens.

The charge sheet alleges the usual offences against all things nice, and is no doubt written with genuine alertness to the possibility that the museum staff are incapable of coping with ‘the darker part of the writer’s oeuvre, including his lack of universalism’. Among other things that alarm the museum staff are Dickens’ support for the British Empire and ‘not for its diversity’, his calls for retribution following the 1857 Indian Mutiny and his mockery of missionaries. Dickens, it warns, had opinions that ‘can cause great offence today’ – the full horror of which we can only guess at, since he seems to have deleted his social-media accounts.

I don’t know if it’s a new thing, this attempt by a public museum to effectively cancel itself, but you have to wonder if it’s the inevitable reductio ad absurdum of cancellation movements. All revolutions eventually come after their own, after all. But it is a bit unusual for this to happen at the level of a local heritage resource.

It is also quite funny when you think about it. We are now approaching a point where there is little for the satirically inclined social commentator to do other than itemise what the grievance fetishists are up to and let their ludicrousness speak for itself. I’m sure Dickens himself would have some real fun with the whole business.

Roger Scruton said that he was brought up to believe one should strive not to cause offence, but these days too many people work tirelessly to take it. This being the case, it might, on occasion, be only polite to offer them what they so desperately want. If somebody has developed the habit of finding trivial things upsetting, the best way to help them is to ridicule them into different ways of being. Indeed, if the disputable opinions of a writer who died 156 years ago offend you, then for your sake, you need to be made fun of.

Aristotle made a similar point some 2,400 years ago. In De Anima, he argued that there is such a thing as an ‘education of the emotions’. So too did the Medievalists and the Scholastics who were able to develop a sophisticated moral psychology in which the ‘ethics of feeling’ – and the value of concepts like shame – were rightly taken to be central. Sometimes it is instructive to find oneself upset. And sometimes, it is an act of charity to be the cause of such upset.

When a writer is as astute as Charles Dickens, the danger is that a fond observation of the times in which he wrote is taken as the same thing as endorsement. The Rochester case is just one more expression of retroactive cancel culture, which urges us to reassess our best writers and thinkers through the lens of present sensibilities. There are many who would happily vaporise the national memory by going after the literature, philosophy and traditions of Common Law that currently preserve it. Unfortunately, the majority of these culture warriors were distributed throughout the arts and heritage structures of the public sector while the rest of us weren’t looking.

The targeting of Dickens is telling. While he may have written within the supposedly disqualifying prejudices of Victorian England, he managed to do so with an eye to the essentials of human beings, their failings and their absurdities. As such, he was ‘universalist’ in the only way that actually matters. People are people, no matter the era they find themselves in. Indeed, if we look at the past and find it wanting, we ought to be mindful that if it were able to look right back at us, it might feel just the same way.

Sean Walsh is associate editor of Country Squire. Find him on Substack here.