I think it may have been Dickens who managed to get public executions to be performed in private rather than make them a public spectacle.

It seemed that many poor people were committing capital crimes so they could get some sort of public acknowledgement of their own existence (their 15 minutes of fame).

The crime rate dropped as a result.

Now if they could only introduce that concept into reality television...

Or blog comment threads! ;-)

Sheeesh, Arjay. Even when I agree with you, you jump down my throat.

Dickens observed the impact of the most active phase of the industrial revolution on the citizenry. He concluded - and wrote about - the divisions it created in society, including some of the more egregious moral ambiguities created by new wealth, not only in the ruling classes but also amongst the emerging middle class.

My only observation was that the ills he described - greed, thoughtless cruelty, self-obsession and self-delusion - have changed little over the centuries. They existed in Roman times, they existed in the Middle Ages, they even existed in the Renaissance. The only real difference is the lens through which they were observed.

To Graham's question, would Dickens be successful today, I'd suggest the answer lies in the the state of society at that time. Dickens undoubtedly had a massive amount of contemporary raw material with which to work, and in creating moral tales from his observations, he was both inspired and limited by it.

Would he have the sort of material with which to work today, that he could turn into a credible story? I would suggest, probably not - at least, not to the same degree. While poverty still exists, as does injustice and inequity, the lines are not so clearly drawn as they were in the nineteenth century. It requires an altogether more subtle approach. Dickens employed the moral sledgehammer, where a scalpel is possibly more appropriate today.

Dickens would be successful in any time imo. He was a workaholic and utterly driven. And of course his fiction was a product of his milieu. If he was writing today it would reflect our world.

The world in which Dickens inhabited did present him with an abundance of material.

It's interesting to note, and Cobbett remarked on this in Rural Rides, that while Britain was busy congratulating itself on the abolition of the slave trade, that working and living conditions, especially in the northern English and Scottish mills and factories, were abysmal.(you really have to read documents pertaining to the period to understand how truly dreadful they were)

Agitation by people of a certain echelon of the upper middle-class probably had the greatest effect on galvanising government intervention in the form of Factory Acts which slowly but surely began to address the conditions and implement protections, starting with women and children. We have to realise that industrialisation in Britain initially unfolded devoid of government regulation.

Our kind of modern social democracy does mitigate the worst abuses which, as Pericles points out, are part and parcel of an unchanging pattern of human behaviour. The contrasts between the poor and the reasonably affluent "in our society" are world's away from the same in Dicken's time.