Exactly, Arjay.

>>Why Pericles during the Industrial Revolution was there so much poverty amongst so much new technology and wealth?<<

For the same reason that poverty and injustice survive to this day, also "amongst so much new technology and wealth". While the world changes, people remain the same - some heroic, some venal, and in between the vast majority of folk who like to read about them.

>>Dickens had a great passion for righting the injustices then,but we today lack the courage and vision to do likewise now.<<

Dickens was able to draw attention to the inequities that existed back then, but to suggest that he was actually able to do anything about them is a little fanciful. Trade Unions were the major catalyst for positive action against worker exploitation, and their rise to a position of power was most definitely post-Dickens.

You must have read a bowdlerised version of Vanity Fair Squeers. While caricature is certainly present in the characters, there is a lot more real character than in Dickens.

Dickens seems to take his cue from music hall, or perhaps it was vice-versa. You always know who to cheer and who to hiss. Thackeray is much more morally ambiguous. The virtuous characters are plodding and dull, while the disreputable are attractive. No reader falls in love with Amelia, but they do with Becky.

I've never actually met a character from Dickens in real life, but I have frequently run into characters from Thackeray.

I suspect that it is the cartoon quality of Dickens' characters, combined with the definite positions on the moral compass that has made him more popular than more ambiguous and subtle writers. And I'm not just thinking of Thackeray and Hardy, but also Eliot and Trollope and a band of others who while remembered receive far less attention.

BTW, I don't judge books on the politics of their authors, but if I did, as a liberal I wouldn't be particularly partial to works by conservatives.

Graham,
I said Thakary's characters were "moral" caricatures, at least his main characters are, good like Amelia and Dobbin or bad like George and his father and Becky. Indeed they're all bad more or less bar Dobbin and Amelia, who tend to be lost in a corrupt world. Thackary's abiding anxieties were similar to mine; he was disillusioned with a world given over to commerce devoid of principals, but also of class structures and the amoral pursuit of material gain. I agree with you about Dickens, and even that Thackary's characters have more blood in them than Dickens' inky and arabesque creations, at least to a point--though Lord Steyne is a perennial "stain" on society and like the other characters needs no more depth than that. Thackary was in fact consciously protesting against Dickens' popular sentimentality and satirising his romantic world of happy philanthropic endings.
If you're comparing Thackary's puppets with Hardy's deep but dismal set, or Eliot's thinkers and aspirants, I'd have to disagree with you. Thackary and Trollope I would be willing to compare, at least in characterisation.
But the beauty of literature is we're free to read it as we please, to a point, and I don't presume to tell you how to suck eggs.
For me as I say Dickens was a master of the language and a comic genius, even if he was shallow.

Pericles,There was an era called the Renaissance in which people,creativity and the arts prospered.Why was not the Industrial revolution an extention of this enlightenment?

The answer is Pericles the instigation of the money system of expressing increases in all of societies productivity as debt by a few elite.During the Renaissance and in the pre-Julius Caesar times,money was created by a sovereign Govt that represented all people and businesses.The Renaissance had debt free tally sticks and the Gold Smiths had very little power.

Of course you Pericles are too wedded to the present system you mistakingly think will save you.It's going down big time Pericles because it destroys the very basis of fairness ,individual freedoms and creativity.Ron Paul for President!

Arjay, that is pretty much off topic. I know you have a problem with fiat money, but it's not what this thread is about. [That's a moderatorial aside.]

I've been wondering whether there are contemporaries who are like Dickens. In a lot of ways he's as much a polemicist as a novelist, and he's twigged to the fact that it's easier to get your argument accepted if you dress it up in emotional terms.

So that makes him a bit like Aesop or Jesus who used stories to illustrate moral dilemmas and propagate solutions to them.

These days the polemical messages that become popular are dressed up as documentaries. Michael Moore, Al Gore and Josh Fox are recent documentary makers who deal in caricatures and who have captured the public imagination for their agendas.

Catch 22 is a bit Dickensian, but more in the existentialist school than the moralistic one.

Another area one might look for the Dickensian is amongst comedians. Perhaps Barry Humphries. But again Humphries is sentimental, but not interested in changing the world.

I guess this raises the question as to whether Dickens would even be successful today, or whether he would have gone into another art form.

Not really off the topic Graham.Dickens wrote about the social/economic injustice of his era.I'm just doing an analysis of why there was such injustice in an era of great creation and industrial productivity.We have the same parallels today with computer technology and industrial productivity,yet so much poverty.

You cannot isolate Dickens to an etherised Kevin Rudd view of the world.Dickens must be studied in context within the socio/economic realities of his time.