Swarmery and bloodbaths: a reconsideration of Dickens on class and race in the 1860s

Copyright permission has been sought but has not been received, therefore this material will remain restricted.This essay offers a reappraisal of Dickens's stances on class and race in the 1860s and examines his reactions to the Jamaican rebellion of 1865, the American Civil War, and growing working-class agitation for suffrage; it also touches briefly upon his engagement with the Irish Question. This article argues that rather far from being a vehement supporter of Governor Edward Eyre's draconian attempts to quell the uprising in Morant Bay, Dickens was in fact ambivalent to events in the West Indies. Far from displaying the type of vitriolic and public fury that characterized his reaction o the Indian "Mutiny" of 1857, Dickens's involvement with the Eyre Defence League was nominal and resulted largely from loyalty to Thomas Carlyle. By juxtaposing Dickens's responses to events in the public sphere with Carlyle's more polemical outbursts, the piece attempts to extricate Dickens's perspective on events at home and abroad from that of his mentor