If we celebrate Charles Dickens we must also acknowledge his racist views, says historian

Readers of Charles Dickens should not ignore his troubling attitudes on race, the historian David Olusoga said as he published a children's book explaining that the author wrote about black people in racist ways.

Olusoga said he loved to read Dickens and was struck by his compassionate writing about the impoverished residents of London's slums. But he urged people to look at the full picture, telling The Telegraph that the author also wrote that he would "exterminate" the Indian race and "blot it out of mankind".

Dickens supported a British governor of Jamaica who brutally crushed an 1865 rebellion by plantation workers, and wrote in derogatory terms about black people.

"I think we need to look at what Dickens' views were, expressed in all sorts of ways, about non-white people," Olusoga, who presented 'Civilisations' on the BBC, said. "He writes eloquently and passionately about the suffering of poor white people all around him in London. He even has compassion for Magwitch, the transported felon [in 'Great Expectations']. 

"But when it comes to non-white people, that compassion evaporates. As someone who adores his writing, it just makes me sad. If we celebrate Dickens, if we say this man had incredible compassion, I think it's important to point out the whole picture.

"I'm just interested in understanding people for who they really are, and Dickens can be both. He can be somebody who walks the streets of Victorian London and feels immense compassion and then mobilise that compassion brilliantly in literature, and he's somebody who can look at non-white people and have no compassion and be convinced of their innate inferiority and their savagery and to buy into simplistic arguments about race that not everybody believed at the time."

Olusoga has written a children's version of his best-selling book, 'Black and British', in which he takes younger readers through black history.

In the book, he writes: "It was possible to be against slavery and still think white people were better than black people.  Charles Dickens, the superstar Victorian novelist whose books had a strong sense of right and wrong, visited America and thought slavery was horrific. But he also wrote about black people in racist ways."

The historian and television presenter said he profoundly disagreed with the notion that institutions re-evaluating their links to slavery and colonialism were imposing 21st century values on the past.

"Why is it imposing a narrative to explain where the money from a stately home came from, or that somebody who was a collector also made their money from slavery? It's just part of the story," he said.

"The problem is that history has already been rewritten. It was written to take out the chapters and episode that people were uncomfortable with, and they tend to be slavery and empire, and they also tend to be the bits that explain the backstories of millions of people who live in Britain today.

"This is not about rewriting history – it's not about imposing the values of today. It's about writing back into the story things that everybody knew at the time."

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